


The Sky Is No Man's Land

by SkadizzleRoss



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Action/Adventure, Alternate Universe - Canon, Apocalypse, Daddy Issues, Demons, Fallen Angels, Gen, Originally Posted on LiveJournal, Road Trips, Season/Series 02, The Colt (Supernatural), Zachariah Being a Dick
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-23
Updated: 2014-07-23
Packaged: 2018-02-10 04:15:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 36,512
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2010618
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SkadizzleRoss/pseuds/SkadizzleRoss
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>AU, set 2006 (season 2). The Winchester brothers are no-name hunters caught up in a losing war against the Horde. That is, until Dean fishes a half-dead tax accountant out of a pile of charred demons in Nowhere, Nebraska. A tax accountant that claims he’s an angel, and offers them the knowledge they need to kill demons – if they’ll help him hunt a traitor in the angels’ ranks. This is the tale of two hunters and a wayward angel smack in the middle of the eons-old battle between the angels of Heaven and those who chose to Fall.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Part I

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A strange find in a Nebraska fountain. A $23 stitch job. Demons make a house call.

  
THE SKY IS NO MAN'S LAND  
by Skadizzleross  
Art by vandlp1088  
07/23/2014  
spn_j2_bigbang

 

 

  


  
[](http://oi57.tinypic.com/2a7wz11.jpg)  
[Click for full size.]

_The difference between us is simple: your god is my devil._  
—Theodore Parker  


Like the art? Please go to the [Master Art Post](http://vandlp1088.livejournal.com/4533.html) (or, it's available on Ao3 [here](http://archiveofourown.org/works/2010984?show_comments=true#comments)). Vandlp1088 did an epic job and deserves some love!

 

 

 

 

_I propose that we add Winchesters to our armament.  
I have a kind of belief in a Winchester when there is any trouble of that sort around._  
—Bram Stoker, _Dracula_

  


 

 

NORTH PLATTE, NE  
 _2006-08-29 02:21 AM_

It’s his favorite flask that’s getting crushed, here.

He can feel the metal pop and dent under his grip, and god knows what his bones are doing where they’ve had the bad luck to get caught between his flask (his _favorite_ flask) and this big-ass demon’s sausage fingers. Holy water splashes up out of the distorted bottle and spills over their grappling hands. It sizzles and burns where it lands on the demon’s skin. Not so much, for Dean. So the demon ends up being the first to let go, and Dean gets to be the one to clock the bastard across the jaw with the abused metal. The demon reels back as more water goes splashing into its face. While it’s clawing at its eyes and screeching, Dean takes the opportunity to turn the flask over in his numb hand. It’s now nicely imprinted with his own fingers.

The demon recovers enough to ground out a polite, “You little _fuck_ \--” before Dean puts a cold iron round between its borrowed eyes. With the host beyond salvaging, it smokes out quick, another black smudge against a dark sky.

The body’s still slumping when Dean’s rolling into cover behind the nearest decent-sized oak, shoulder digging into scaled bark as he frees the Glock’s clip and counts rounds by the moonlight sifting through the trees. Six rounds, and it’s his last clip. Perfect.

He gets the clip back into place, gives the flask one more disgusted look, and tucks it into his pocket. His hand lights up with pain when he shakes it out. Something feels a little loose in there, and not in a good way. But it’s not his thumb and it’s not his forefinger, so he gives the hand one testing stretch and adjusts his grip on the Glock to compensate.

Bearing his shoulder into the tree, he twists around the trunk to get a good look towards the center of the park. Up there, _that’s_ where the real fun is. The smoked demon at his back just had the misfortune of being late to the show. By the shouts and scuffles and occasional flash-fires of bright light, the demons up ahead have got their hands full. He’d tailed six into the park. He glances at the dead host; still motionless amongst the overgrown grass and dead leaves. Make that five. Six rounds, five demons. Shit odds, but they’ll have to do.

Moonlight’s not enough to get him a good look at the melee going on a hundred yards ahead, but he can make out an oak with some low branches off to his right. A quick sprint and he could have some high ground and a clear shot. He gives the field another quick scan, ahead, behind, and takes the leap.

He’s all of five steps into a low sprint when he hears heavy steps to his left, fast approaching. He turns to meet the demon bearing down on him and gets one shot off into its chest before the distance closes. The demon barrels in undeterred, and they’re both hitting turf. It scrabbles at his face, fingernails digging furrows down his forehead, heading for the eyes. Dean pulls a boot under its torso and kicks out hard, catching the thing in the soft of the belly. The demon gets forced back onto its heels, and Dean pulls the Glock up to get a bead on his forehead.

That’s around the time the world bleaches white.

The blast rushes through him, a cold white light that leaves every nerve fiber singing. Then it’s gone, leaving nothing but bleached vision and ringing ears behind.

He’s still blind and deaf when the heavy warmth of the demon slumps against him, and he almost shoots the fucking thing again before he realizes it’s limp. He scrambles back, legs tangling in its arms before he plants a heel on its shoulder and shoves free. It half-twists onto its back, and Dean can see blackened craters where its eyes should have been. They’ve left a long streak of charred meat down the leg of his jeans.

“Jesus,” Dean mutters. He gets the gun back into grip and half-crawls, half-stumbles into the safety of the nearest tree and then mutters a shaky, “Shit” for good measure.

Flashbang?

Except the demon laid out with a dead vessel’s empty eye sockets trained on the moon means it wasn’t a flashbang.

It means—

He adjusts his grip on the Glock and sinks to a crouch, twisting around the bole of the tree. A low, dull light hangs low on the ground where the main shitstorm had been – demons converging on whatever the hell they’d been hunting. Or whatever had been hunting them.

As he watches, the light pulses and goes dark. He waits a good two minutes, gathering his breath in low, steady draughts as he waits for his hearing to recover. Nothing’s moving; nothing he can see. And that, that doesn’t really surprise him at all.

They’ve seen it in a dozen places, heard of it in a dozen more. Akron, Ithaca, Birmingham, Salina - demons burned out, dozens in one fight. Always the same thing: cratered eyes and no survivors. Nobody had a clue on how it was done. Some new weapon, the mother of all exorcisms? No one had ever seen the source, and no hunter had owned up to it. Hell, no one had actually seen it for themselves – ‘til now.

Dean grins to himself as he drags the flashlight out of his pocket. Sam’s gonna be so pissed.

He approaches the position slow, keeping his weight spread steady between his feet in case anybody else is of the mind to take a running tackle. Not much reason for the worry; nobody’s getting up anytime soon, judging by the shadowed sockets looking up at him.

The park’s fountain had taken center stage in the scuffle, and one of the retaining walls is collapsed in, some poor bastard face-down and unmoving in the broken pile of concrete’s center. Water’s still spilling over and around the pile of bodies in runnels as it races to the dirt beyond the sidewalk.

There aren’t six of them. Dean lets out a low whistle of appreciation as he does a quick head count. Twenty. Jesus. And they’re all arranged like a bad piece of modern art, every dead heel pointing in the same direction: something that looks less like the crater Dean was expecting, and more like a scrawny little guy in a business suit.

Dean hesitates a moment, splashing a small semicircle around the guy. He nudges a cautious boot against the man’s leg and, when that doesn’t elicit much, attempts the same with a boot toe to the ear. Nothing.

He gives the dead surrounding them one more glance, catches the flashlight in his teeth, and drops into a crouch. He keeps the gun in his hand as he reaches to take a pulse. A lick of static arcs at his fingers, and he jerks back in surprise, shaking numbed fingers. A second, slower approach doesn’t get the same jolt.

The guy’s skin is clammy with the fountain water, but there’s a pulse, slow and steady. Rolling back the eyelids, there’s a pair of healthy, unscorched eyes and a decent pupil response, but the guy’s out cold. He moves south, sweeping for weapons.

There’s a blade – small for a sword, and unexpectedly light – loosely grasped in the guy’s right hand. He gives it a quick once-over and tucks it into his belt. As he moves on to the sodden trenchcoat, the flashlight catches on red. He peels the suit jacket back further. There it is: a circle of fresh blood, leeching slowly through the white of his well-to-do shirt.

Dean turns the flashlight away and curses.

He rips the rest of the shirt open, trying to get a look. Stab wound. Not huge, but doing some good bleeding. He pries his fingers under a messy tie and works it loose. Wadding it into a compress, he jams it against the wound. He works the belt out of the trenchcoat, tying the whole mess down into place.

Then he falls back onto his heels and stares.

Almost two dozen smoked demons and a guy in a suit.

Well—shit.

♤ ♤ ♤

STATE ROUTE 61, ARTHUR, NE  
 _2006-08-29 05:32 AM_

Dean makes one abortive attempt at dialing with his thumb, then mashes the buttons with his index finger while he digs around in the trunk for the med kit.

The ring drones through twice before Sam picks up with an uninspired, “What?”

“Merry Christmas.”

There’s a suspicious pause. “…what?”

Dean’s about to slam the trunk shut when his eyes catch on the silver shortsword. He picks it up and turns it in the weak predawn light. He’s never seen its likeness, with the gripless, smooth handle and the unnatural, silver-like sheen. Sam might be able to say something about it; all Dean can determine is that it’s well-kept. It’s clean, and the edge isn’t thinned or brittle. Sharp enough to cut on a diagonal without nicking at casual handling.

He moves to set it back down, and then thinks better of it and hides it beneath two canisters of salt and a case of ammo. Better safe than sorry.

“Merry Christmas! Like, four months early. Whatever. I’m still the best brother in the world. Guess what I got you?”

He shoulders his duffel and the med kit and climbs the steps to the trailer. Even at dawn the air hangs heavy with the smells of soured sweat and mold.

“In North Platte, Nebraska,” Sam deadpans. “Let me guess. Is it corn?”

“Nope. Guess again!”

Sam sighs. “An exorcism? If it's an exorcism, I've got another three hours before I'm gonna be over there."

“ _Better._ ” Dean brandishes an arm at the unconscious body spread out on the cot, even though Sam can’t see the gesture. “I got you your very own John Constantine, complete with super-powered demon bomb! Or—y’know, so long as he doesn’t bleed out. Who’s the best brother ever?”

There’s a few seconds of silence while that sinks in. “You saw one of the blasts?”

“ _Yeah._ ” Dean almost can’t believe it himself. “Almost took my eyes out with it. It’s kinda like a flashbang, except… cold? It’s very _Raiders of the Lost Ark._ ”

Sam’s voice ratchets up to bitching frequency. “You _saw_ one? Christ, Dean, don’t tell me that. Are your eyes alright? Hearing? That guy in Akron was deaf for--”

“We’re talking on the phone, Sam. If I was deaf, do you think we’d be having this conversation right now? I’m fine. Vision’s fine. My ears were ringing for a bit, there, but now they’re fine too.” He doesn’t mention the bleeding ears, because that’d only make Sam bitch more.

There’s a moment of disapproving silence before Sam rolls on: “So you found the source?”

He pours himself a finger of whiskey from the bottle already laid out on the table and drags a chair over toward the cot.

“You won’t believe it. Scrawny guy in a nine-to-five suit and Columbo trenchcoat. Not doing too well at the moment, though. Gonna put in a few stitches and see if his color improves.”

“It’s just a guy? Who is he?”

He picks at the wallet sitting on top of the folded up trenchcoat. “James Novak. License, credit cards, insurance. Hell, he’s even got freakin’ Costco membership. If it’s not real, it’s the most thorough cover ident I’ve ever seen a hunter carry. He’s even got a punch card at some local café. One more and he’s got a free drink.”

“It’s not a possession?”

“Didn’t react to holy water, cold iron, silver, or salt.” Dean tucks the phone into the crook of his shoulder, held in place by his ear, and pulls out the stitching kit and some gauze. “I found him at the center of twenty demon corpses that look like they’d been blown out by a god damned explosion. They all had burnt-out eyes, and he was passed out in a busted fountain with a stab wound in his side and nothing on him but a pig-sticker.”

“Damn. Stay on his good side. You move him?”

“Yeah. The abandoned trailer off of SR 61.”

“I’m a couple miles outside the state line. I can make it in—an hour, hour and a half?”

“I’ll be here. Getting my Florence Nightingale on.”

Dean peels aside the makeshift necktie-compress and presses a length of whiskey-soaked gauze against Novak’s wound. The burn of alcohol doesn’t get any reaction.

“You gonna restrain him?” Sam asks.

“I’ve got salt down.”

“You think that’s gonna be enough?”

“Sam. I threw the book at him.”

Dean’s wiped enough blood off that he can get a proper look at the wound. It’s deeper than he’d like; and the pocket of smooth gray in amongst the darker red of torn muscle means it’s too close to intestine for his liking. He’ll probably have to spend the whole morning watching to see that Novak doesn’t go septic.

As he’s gauging the depth of the wound, there’s a split second where the light catches in a strange way; blue shine on the edge of the bright red of fresh welling blood. It’s just as soon gone. Dean turns his head aside, waits; but it’s gone, like that.

Thirty-two hours without sleep, things start getting weird.

“Yeah, well, the book doesn’t say anything about torching demons,” Sam’s saying.

“Which is exactly why I don’t want to piss him off from the get go. This could be _huge_ for us.” They could finally start _killing_ those sons ‘a bitches, instead of sending them downstairs for a timeout. Hunters start putting demons down left and right and they’d learn real quick not to show their ugly mugs. “I’m not gonna give this guy a reason to go to ground again. If we can get him to share his playbook, we could maybe start _winning_ this thing.”

Sam huffs his agreement, then huffs his disagreement, then settles for an exasperated, “Well – just – be polite, or something, until I get there.”

“You know me. I’ll be my usual charming self.” He flashes his shit-eating grin as he peels out a clean suture and needle.

“Yeah, that’s what I’m afraid of,” Sam mutters.

“Spare me, bitch.” Dean rolls his shoulders and shifts the phone to his other ear. “Look, I’ve got an hour of stitching in front of me.”

“Yeah, alright. Be there in an hour and a half. Give me a heads up if anything happens.”

“Yeah-huh.” He snaps the phone shut. He considers the screen a few seconds, and then opens a text message to Sam: _strving. get pizza._

The phone’s buzzing with a reply before he closes it, but when he opens the text it isn’t Sam.

      **FROM** : ⏏⏏⏏⏏⏏⏏  
      **MSG** : ⏏⏏⏏⏏⏏ ⏏⏏⏏ ⏏⏏⏏

Dean considers the text a second. It’s all just stand-ins for corrupted symbols. Junky Nebraska signal, probably. The phone goes off again.

      **FROM** : Princess  
      **MSG** : it’s 6 in the morning jackass, no one’s selling pizza

“Bitch,” Dean mutters, and answers: _xtra sausage no fungi_

He sets the thread and needle to soak in a capful of whiskey while he gives the wallet a second peruse. He flips past the pictures of a woman (wife?) and a smiling blonde girl – 10, maybe 11 - to pry $23 in random bills out of the fold, and out falls a wedding ring. Dean raises an eyebrow, mulling it over in his hand. 16K, scuffed from a few years’ wear and tear.

“Well, Jimmy, I figure twenty-three bucks makes me the cheapest stitch-job this side of New Orleans. But I’ll take it.” Dean pockets the cash and returns the wedding ring to its place before throwing the wallet down next to Novak’s old brick of a cell phone. Giving his hands a quick rinse, he continues, “No complaining, though, if you wake up and don’t like the work. Beggars can’t be choosers.”

He’s about ready to get started on this mess when he realizes he forgot the most important part. Dean digs his phone back out and thumbs through the music selection, considering the body sprawled out on the cot. “If I had to guess, I’d say you’re not the Metallica type. Let’s try some Led Zeppelin. My brother has shit taste in music, and even _he_ can’t argue that Zeppelin is classic.” A beat. “Well, I’m sure he _could_. He just knows I’d beat his ass if he tried.”

 _Over the Hills and Far Away_ starts playing through the tinny speakers on the phone. He nods approvingly and douses a length of gauze in whiskey.

 _Far Away, Rain Song,_ and half of _Traveling Riverside Blues_ later, he’s winding the needle through one last locking loop before bringing the suture taut and cutting it free. After a quick survey of his work, he presses a piece of clean gauze down and brings an ace bandage around to keep it in place.

He’s on the second wrap-around when the guy’s chest hitches. Dean stops where he is, fingers loose on the roll of bandage, and looks up to catch an overbright stare.

They’re both pretty startled, for the first couple milliseconds.

Then Novak’s snapping something unintelligible and giving a full-body wriggle, smacking into Dean’s elbow with a bony knee. He doesn’t bother to investigate the dimensions of the couch, and a second, more dedicated thrash has him tumbling to the trailer floor in an awkward heap, the roll of ace bandage looping after him in a broad arc. It’d be kind of funny, if the handcuff chain that’d been keeping his hand attached to the radiator wasn’t dangling loosely from his wrist. The link of chain that’d been connecting the two clatters to the floor in a mutilated semi-circle.

Dean steps back a pace and draws the Glock from his waistband, thumbing the safety off. The guy’s attention snaps to the gun at the click. Dean keeps the gun low, and his voice easy: “Morning, sunshine.”

His eyes twitch up to Dean. A couple expressions chase across his face before he settles on a narrow-eyed suspicion. “Who are you?”

“Name’s Dean,” he answers calmly. “Yours?”

Novak ignores him. He’s found the handcuff still clamped on his wrist, and he pries at it in something approaching panic. Whatever Hulk strength he’d had seems to be either particular to chain, or fading fast. Or, Dean notes curiously, doesn’t apply to blessed iron with a few binding sigils carved in.

The handcuff doesn’t budge, and he heaves himself backward as he returns his attention to Dean. “What are you? _What_ are you? Why did you bring me here?” He bangs his shoulder on a counter in a clumsy bid to get to his feet; he collapses back down, hand flying up to grip at his collarbone.

Could just be a good actor. And Dean’d feel a lot better with just letting the guy have his little panic attack until Sam gets in here, but—shit. The guy’s already popped a couple stitches; he can see a fresh line of blood running from here.

He flips the safety back on the gun – makes it clear the guy can see him do so – and tucks it carefully back into his belt. Novak watches him, breathing in small hitches.

“Look.” He holds up both palms. “Just a regular grade human, okay?”

“ _Who are you?_ ”

“Dean. Like I said. While you were undoing all my hard work.” He gestures towards the roll of bandage trailing after him.

Novak’s attention traces briefly over the bandage, and he tugs at the gauze to reveal the stitchwork underneath. Dean winces as he catches a nail on a suture, tugging at bloodied skin; but the guy doesn’t even twitch. He glares back up at Dean. “Why did you bring me here?” He glances around the trailer, actually taking in the decor. His frown deepens. “What is this place?”

“I know. Classy, right? M’just borrowing it.” Pressing his palms against his knees, Dean gets to his feet. The guy jerks a little, but stays where he is on the cracked linoleum. “As for why, hey – you looked like you could need a hand, is all.”

He plucks the phone off the counter by the couch, flicking off Robert Plant halfway through some _Immigrant Song_ warbling. “So, you gonna tell me what _you_ are?”

Novak grips a cabinet knob and sways to his feet. He doesn’t look imposing; slouching, skinny little white guy that he is. But a little kick-slide and he has the chain around his ankles groaning and shearing apart, so Dean’s still itching towards his gun. His guest stares him down from his tenuous grip on the wall. “Take me back to where I was.”

Dean smiles politely. “Look, man. No offense? But I really can’t do that. You just went _Hiroshima_ on those demons.” He jerks his thumb over his shoulder. “I need to know who—or, frankly, what—you are, and how you did it.”

Novak hangs there a moment, still and tight-mouthed. “You can’t hold me here,” he says quietly. Then he sways in an attempt to rise to his full height of 5 foot nothing, and the air sways with him, pressing hard against Dean’s skin. The aluminum shell of the trailer whines, and scratched glass rattles in the rotting window frames. “Take me _back_.”

Dean brings the gun back out and rests it gently against his thigh as he backsteps carefully towards the door. He’s running through a quick mental checklist. The rattling windows trick pins him pretty solidly at ‘demonic’—either of the biblical variety or the more exotic variants. It doesn’t discount anything of an earth- or air-elemental persuasion, but those are less likely to come in human form. If it were a ghost riding in that body, the cold iron would have penned it in for sure. But then, demons aren’t supposed to be able to brush off cold iron like it’s made of paper, either.

He makes a note to run it past _Encyclopedia Samanthica_.

“First off, you were stabbed. I closed you up, and did a decent job at it, too, before you went all PCP. So, y’know, no need to thank me or anything. Second, I can’t exactly _let you go_ until I know you’re not _evil_. So…” Dean gestures to the room.

The pressure redoubles, and Novak makes an aggressive step forward. “You can’t hold me here.”

Dean lifts the gun—not leveling it squarely, but making the threat clear. “But I can test out what putting a few _more_ holes in you does. Start from there and work my way up.” Novak’s starting to sway a bit more, sweat beading bright on his forehead. Dean gestures with the gun back to the couch. “Or you can sit back down, and we can talk it out. You’re going after demons; I don’t _want_ to have beef with you, but I will, if you make me.”

With a final glare and one more little shudder of the air, Novak folds back into himself with a drunken lurch. The doublewide groans as the atmosphere collapses back into its natural order. Dean grimaces and presses a knuckle against his ear, waiting for the pop to work its way out. “Nice trick.”

He slides a hand along the wall, finds the foot of the couch and promptly collapses there. He’s looking gray around the edges. “There’s nothing I can tell you,” he mutters to the ceiling. “We don’t discuss our matters with humans.”

Dean’s quiet a moment, considering. Then he pulls the chair out of arms’ reach and sits down, facing Novak. “You’re the one that killed those demons, aren’t you?”

He stills, watching Dean carefully. “You saw?”

“I didn’t really see anything. Just a bunch of light. But it was…” He trails off, not sure how to describe it. “Anyway, you gotta be careful how you use that thing. I thought it was going to burn my eyes out with the rest of ‘em.”

Novak stares at him with a clinical curiosity. “It should have.”

 _Thanks, asshole,_ Dean thinks. But says instead: “How do you do it?”

His curiosity fades into suspicion. “Why do you want to know?”

“So we can use it. So we can _share_ it.” Isn’t that obvious? “There aren’t enough hunters, and more die every day while the demons just get put on ice for a while. This could really turn things around.”

“You’re a hunter,” he surmises. “We’ve heard of you. But you misunderstand; it isn’t a physical weapon, or one of your incantations. It’s--” He struggles with a word, and ends up shrugging. “It’s of no use to you. I’m sorry.”

“It’s a hell of a lot of use to us!”

He shakes his head. “It’s not something that can be taught.”

“You haven’t met my brother. Kid’s never found a crossword he couldn’t solve.”

“It can’t be taught, and it can’t be learned,” Novak says, impatient. “We purge demons with what we _are._ ”

“And what _are_ you?”

“Soldiers of the Heavenly Host. You call us ‘angels’.”

Dean tries not to laugh. It sounds like a really bad name for a biker gang. “So what, ‘must be this holy to enter?’ I know a guy—a pastor, up in Minnesota. You could teach him?”

Now Novak’s staring at him like he’s challenged. “It can’t be taught.”

“ _Why?_ “

“Because you’re _humans._ ”

There’s an audible pause. Dean rewinds the conversation. “Wait. What?”

“You seem to have suffered hearing damage,” Novak mutters, fiddling with the handcuff again.

Dean knocks the chair backward as he stands. “But you’re not a demon. I checked. _Exorcizamus te, omnis immundus spiritus._ Um. _Omnis… Omnis…_ Shit.” He’s got a copy of the exorcism in his duffel. He scrambles for it.

Novak just watches him, eyes clear. “No, I’m not a demon. I’ve answered your questions—“ He pulls at the broken handcuff chain. “Will you release me, now?”

Warily, Dean turns to face him. “If you’re not human, what are you?”

“I told you. I’m an angel.”

“And when you say ‘angel’ you mean…”

“Servants of Heaven, warriors of God. You exorcise demons, surely you’re not unfamiliar with the concept.”

“Yeah, but angels aren’t real.”

“We are,” he says. “Whether you believe that matters very little to me.”

Dean thinks he might be able to hear the gears turning in his own head, he’s thinking so hard. Processing. Trying to figure out the end-game, because why—of all the lies he could have made—would he choose _that_ one?

Or it’s just a joke? A really bad joke? ‘Ha ha, Winchester, we got you good, Caleb says he’s still gonna kick your ass the next time he sees you’? It’s in poor taste, that’s for sure. But the trick with the demons, that had been real.

He narrows his eyes, “Who _are_ you?”

He watches Dean in careful silence. "Castiel," he answers eventually.

“Cas-ti-el?” Dean has to sound it out by syllables, and he can’t quite get his mouth around the sounds the way that Novak did. “D’you get beat up as a kid, with a name like that?”

Castiel tilts his head a moment, then scowls. “I fail to see the correlation.”

“It’s—not.” Dean just can’t seem to find his feet with this conversation. “Look—Cas-teel. Or Cas-ti-el. Whatever. I don’t buy this whole ‘angel’ thing, but you’re killing demons, and I _want_ to be killing demons, so can we agree that we’re on the same side?”

He nods.

“My brother is on his way here. Will you stay and talk to him? He’s better at all of this stuff than I am.”

“No,” he answers, quick and simple. “I answered your questions.” He sways to his feet, inclines his head; an attempt at looking dignified that falls flat with his half-open, bloodied shirt and the slight sway to his stance. “I am thankful for your assistance. But I don’t have the luxury of time. So if you’d return me my things, I’ll take my leave.”

Dean draws the Glock from where it’d been tucked in his pants, and mentally runs through the checklist again. Silver, salt, cold iron, holy water. That leaves fire, beheading, staking—or grievous bodily harm, all else failing. Of course the gun is the only thing actually _on_ Dean at the moment— _rookie move, Winchester_ —but he thinks he could stand a decent chance if it came down to it.

He hopes it doesn’t come down to it.

“Your stuff’s on the table.” Dean motions to it with the barrel. Wallet, keys, a waterlogged phone with a cracked screen.

Castiel gives the gun one cursory glance and moves toward his things, clumsily buttoning up his shirt as he goes. He unfolds the trenchcoat and shrugs into it, slow and awkward. The wallet and keys and wadded-up tie go into an inside pocket without a glance. The cell phone, he picks up and frowns at.

“It’s fried,” Dean supplies.

He considers the phone carefully, then brings his fingers down into a fist. The plastic casing deforms and shatters with a series of dull snaps. He deposits the remains of the ruined phone on the table.

Dean stands warily behind the table, just watching, keeping hold of his gun but not aiming it. “You’re one of the good guys, right?” Because letting him walk away—letting something that _isn’t human_ walk away—goes against all his training.

But they can’t really afford to lose the one ally that might help them win. Even if that means letting it walk out the door right now.

He stands and considers, hands dangling by his sides under long trenchcoat sleeves. “I’m one of the good guys,” he agrees. “I’m sorry I couldn’t offer you anything in return.”

“Just—“ Dean scrubs his face with his hands. He looks around the trailer for a scrap of paper and comes up with a napkin. Dean scribbles out his name and phone number. “If you ever feel like sharing trade secrets, or—I don’t know. Anything. You can reach me there.”

He accepts the napkin with a quiet nod, reading it over once before adding it to his growing pocket collection. Then he steps towards the door, fumbling with the knob briefly before getting it to engage and turn. He lingers a moment, one foot on one side of the salt line, one foot on the other, and says: “Thank you.” Then he’s stepping out onto Nebraska dirt and the door’s slapping shut behind him.

Dean looks around the room and lets out a breath he’d been holding. “That was probably the stupidest thing I’ve ever done.” When the room doesn’t answer him, he rounds out the sentiment with, “Fuck.”

He takes a long drink directly from the whiskey bottle and then calls Sam.

He answers on the second ring, but Dean can hear the murmur of background chatter and a muffled ‘Thank you’ out of Sam before the background noise dies down to the hiss of wind. Sam puts the phone up to his ear. “Still alive?”

“Uh, yeah. Yeah, he is that.”

Sam takes a pause, probably to frown at his car keys. “What happened?”

“He woke up. We talked. I was polite— _just like you said_ —so don’t you dare blame this on me.” Dean jabs his finger at the air; Sam will know he’s doing it, even if he can’t see it.

“Uh-huh,” Sam says slowly. “So you talked, and…?”

“And then he left.”

Dean hates it when he can actually hear Sam’s oversized brain working on the other end of the phone.

“He left,” Sam repeats.

“Yes.”

There’s a long pause. “Dean, if this is some kind of prank, it’s not that funny.”

Dean takes another drink, and pulls aside the tiny curtain in the trailer window. In the gray-dawn light he can still see Trenchoat’s silhouette picking its way along the gravel road leading toward the highway.

“It’s a little funny.”

“Guy’s half-dead, and you let him walk?”

“He bounced back fast.”

“Did he tell you anything?”

“I don’t know. Yeah, I guess.” He shrugs. “He said he’s not human, and he can’t teach us how to do the demon-killing thing.”

“Great.” Sam huffs into the phone. “Not human? I thought you tested him. You sure he didn’t whammy you?”

“He didn’t _whammy_ me. I was fully aware of what I was doing. Hell, I think he was more surprised than me that I let him go.” Aw, shit. As the words are leaving his mouth, Dean realizes he hadn’t meant to say that.

“ _You_ let him go. Are you out of your friggin’ _mind?_ ”

“Don’t— It’s not like that. Hey, you were the one that told me to be nice!”

“Yeah! Give him some soup or something, not _let him go!_ ”

“He didn’t want _soup_ ; he wanted to be let go! It’s not— It’s like—“ Dean’s not sure even _he_ understands why he did it, so he doesn’t know how he can explain this to Sam. “He’s on our side, right? I wouldn’t hog-tie Bobby and keep him in the backseat.”

“If Bobby was our first and only lead on killing demons I’d give it some serious consideration,” Sam snaps back.

“No you wouldn’t.” Dean’s certain of that, at least. Dad would’ve, yeah. Hell, two hours ago Dean would’ve said he’d do it, himself. But not Sam. Sam’s always been too clean, too far removed from the trenches, for this moral soot to reach him.

“Screw you.” Which is Sam’s way of acceding the point.

“Look, I just—“ Dean didn’t intend to get into this argument. He didn’t intend to argue at all. “I let him go. I probably couldn’t have kept him here if I’d tried. He ripped apart my ‘cuffs like they were paper.”

And maybe, just maybe, this ‘Castiel’ guy will take the gesture of goodwill and decide that hunters aren’t so bad after all.

“Yeah.” Sam’s already winding down. “You have any theories on what he was?”

“No. But I get the feeling that he doesn’t spend a lot of time around people. Might be something old.”

“Some kind of god, maybe? Might not react to any of the usuals.”

“Maybe.”

“Alright. Still think you’re out of your mind, but—“ He sighs. “I’m leaving town now, I’ll be there in ten.”

“With pizza?”

“With pizza.”

“Did you order extra sausage? I hope you ordered extra sausage. I’m starving.”

Dean can hear the eyeroll before the line clicks.

♤ ♤ ♤

Dean stares at the Hot Pocket like it’s a pile of organs. “What is this.”

Sam brushes past him to drop the coffee on the kitchen counter before he holds up a warning hand. “Dude, don’t even.”

“It’s not even hot.” When he turns back, Dean’s poking a finger at the cellophane. “It’s, like, lukewarm at best. And soggy.”

“You ask for pizza at 6 in the morning, that’s what you get. Reasonable people get lukewarm breakfast sandwiches.” He waves his own unappetizing breakfast as Exhibit A.

“What. You had an entire state to drive. You couldn’t find a single all-night pizza place?”

"The entire state of _Nebraska_. You're lucky the 7-11 was 24 hours."

“And then you only buy me one hot pocket. _One_. It’s like you’re trying to starve me.”

“Consider it your punishment,” Sam deadpans, and pries his coffee loose of the holster.

“ _You said to be nice!_ ”

“Since when do you listen to me, anyway?” He squints at Dean, and says for the fourth time: “Christo.”

“Bite me.” Dean clicks his teeth together, menacingly. “There’s no winning. I do what you say, I get bitched at. I don’t do what you say, I get bitched at. Even when everything goes right, I still get bitched at. You’re a little bitch-factory. Mass production of bitchiness. Made in America. Let’s outsource this job, please.”

Sam gives him the ‘You’re absurd’ look and wanders towards the couch. There’s a broken handcuff dangling from the radiator; he picks at the chain, then lets it drop with a rattle. “Did he give you a name, at least?”

Dean answers through a mouthful of Hot Pocket, sounding uncertain: “Cas-ti-el? Castiel? Cas-something.”

“Cas-ti-el. Not James Novak. He was possessing someone?” He takes a half-turn to poke at a dented cell phone lying on the table. The plastic casing is shattered, the screen fried.

Dean shakes his head. “No ectoplasm, didn’t react to an exorcism.” He gestures towards the phone. “That was his. It was bricked, water damage. He did the crushing.”

“Huh.” Might still be able to salvage something. The memory card, maybe. Sam fiddles with the cracked casing a minute, then tucks the phone into his pocket. He nudges a half-unrolled packet of gauze down the couch and flops down. “The ID and everything matched that Novak guy, right? We should look him up, see if he’s been listed as a missing person.”

Dean nods along around the last of his hot pocket.

Sam drops his head back, continues his ramble towards the ceiling. “Did you try any of the herbs? Devil’s lace, vervain? Maybe something New World, white sage, sweetgrass…”

He gets cut off by two brisk knocks on the door.

Dean frowns, and picks up the gun where it had been resting on the table. He flips the safety off. “You hear a car?”

“No.” Sam’s on his feet, throwing a towel over the scattered first aid supplies and checking the safety on his own gun. He steps towards the closest window, and shrugs. “Two guys; plainclothes. Don’t recognize them.” He pauses a minute. “Yeah, car’s up the road. White coupe.” He frowns. “I just saw it in town.”

Dean tucks the gun into the back of his pants, but keeps one hand on it as he opens the door.

There’s two white guys waiting patiently, done up in plain shirts and jeans. The jackets seem a little out of place, with the temperature already climbing towards the high eighties. Sam tracks the short, burly guy staring at the Impala, off by the side of the driveway; the one at the door is looking Dean over and flashing an empty grin. “Mornin’, sir. Hope we didn’t wake you.”

Dean keeps his hand on the gun and props his boot toe against the inside of the door, but flashes a disarming smile. “Can I help you?”

“I think so.” He jerks a thumb towards his partner, who stares at Dean flatly. “We’re working a case out of North Platte. Helluva mess late last night, don’t know if you’ve heard – anyway, our one lead went and wandered off on us. But we don’t expect he crawled too far.” Sam drops away from the window to grab the salt canister by Dean’s duffel.

The visitor is rolling on: “So, don’t s’pose you picked up any hitchhikers last night? Male Caucasian, would’ve been about yeigh high--” By the distorted shadow on the floor, he waves a hand just below shoulder height. “Early 30’s, white collar kind of look to him.”

A breeze chases past the door and into the room, bringing the acrid burn of sulfur with it. Dean’s hand tightens casually on his gun. Within two muted steps Sam has his shoulder against the back of the door, the muzzle of the gun resting lightly against the dusty aluminum.

“Look,” Dean continues casually, “I’m gonna need to see a badge before I tell you anything. You know how it is; you can’t be too careful. Just yesterday I saw a news report about how thieves pretend to be cops so that you’ll let them in, and then BAM! Right when you’re not looking.”

“’course.” He smiles, and shuffles around. A badge flashes in the morning sun.

Dean ticks his shoulders up in a shrug. “Well, officer, I can tell you I did not pick up any hitchhikers last night. That shit’s not safe. I mean, you’d never know if you picked up an _axe murderer_ or something. So no way, no hitchhikers for me.”

The demon’s shadow nods placidly along. “That so? Not in that shiny car of yours? ‘cause I tell you—“ He takes a step closer, and Sam tenses up behind the door. “That thing just _reeks_ of that holier-than-thou bullshit. He must’ve been bleeding like a stuck pig.”

That’s all the warning they get before the trailer gives a sickening lurch and Dean’s airborne, slamming hard into the far side of the doublewide.

Dean lands with a crash of splintering wood as Sam drops a shoulder into the door and shoves, hard. “Call the boss,” the demon’s saying to his buddy, holding back Sam’s efforts with one casual hand. Sam gauges the demon’s position by the shadow on the floor, presses the muzzle against the door and fires twice. The first skims torso. With the second, the demon’s hand is briefly obscured in a mist of blood. It jerks in surprise. Sam slams at the door hard in the interim, but there’s a hand two fingers shy of five gripping the door’s edge. The demon slams the door back into Sam and shoves through into the trailer proper.

Two shots from Dean, off to Sam’s right. The first takes a chunk out of the jaw; the  
second hits skull.

The demon gives a few full-bodied jerks before he smokes out and slumps across the linoleum. Sam drags the demon’s feet in far enough to get the door shut, then shoves the body against the door with one boot. He takes a quick over-the-shoulder glance towards Dean, his gun still on the door. "Y'alright?"

He’s crouched in the remains of what had once been a chair. “Yeah,” he answers, slightly breathless. “The other one?”

There’s two thin streams of morning light filtering in through the bloodied bullet holes in the door. They both watch as the first, then the second gets blocked off by shadow. Sam raises his gun, and moves to put a boot against the door – just as something scuffles in the gravel and whoever was blocking the doorway, by the sound of the meaty _thud_ , collides with it headfirst instead.

The jug of holy water is sitting behind the door near Sam. Dean grabs it, and on a silent count Sam swings the door open and Dean splashes water against the body outside.

It catches the last demon in the face. He shrieks, twisting and writhing as far as he can under the hands fisted in his hair and the back of his jacket. Sam watches with astonishment as some skinny white collar businessman digs his fingers in and hauls a demon – a _demon_ \- bodily aside. There’s a loud thunk as he slams the demon into the trailer’s siding before throwing him to the ground. He pins the hissing demon with a knee to the small of the back and a hand against his neck. There’s a broken cuff on the taxman’s wrist, flashing bright in the sunlight. Castiel.

Dean’s dropping down to the gravel. “Sam! Exorcism!”

Sam trains the gun on the demon’s ear, the Latin syllables already rolling. Trenchcoat was muttering something under his breath; at Sam’s arrival, he gives Sam’s gun a sidelong glance, shuts his mouth and digs his fingers deeper into the flesh of the demon’s neck.

There’s the usual spitting and writhing and eye-rolling, but the guy that’d been a comatose case all of half an hour ago takes it with stride. He holds the host tight from the first _exorcizamus te_ straight to the demonic ichor sinking into gravel. A demon can’t even get himself an inch off the ground under 130 pounds of skinny tax accountant.

The host goes limp. In the sudden silence, Sam ticks the gun up a few inches to focus on the side of Castiel’s head. “What are you.”

Dean dusts himself off and gestures between them. “Sam, this is my new friend, Castiel. Castiel, this is my brother, Sam.”

Sam snaps, “Yeah, I figured that part out.”

Dean mouths ‘Be nice!’ at Sam, accompanied by a smirk.

Castiel says, “Hello, Sam,” and rises slowly to his feet. Sam tracks him through the entire motion with the barrel of the gun, but Castiel isn’t bothered by it. He sets to straightening his shirt. “I apologize for the demons.”

“This isn’t our first rodeo. He still alive?” Dean climbs down the steps to kneel in the dirt beside the host body.

“Yes,” Castiel says, stepping over the host’s tangled legs to give Dean more room. The guy’s pulse agrees.

Sam’s still tracking Castiel’s movements uneasily, but the gun’s drifted down towards his thigh. “Sounded like they’re looking for you.”

“They want to kill me,” Castiel answers calmly, meandering past the Impala.

“Huh.” Sam tilts his head back. “Seems like they’re a little outmatched.”

“Not all of them.” Castiel frowns through the film of road dust on the Impala’s windows. “There was a weapon, in North Platte. A sword. Did you see it?”

Dean just ticks a passive eyebrow up. “Why?”

Castiel frowns at him a moment. “I need it.” He disengages, pacing towards the trailer door. “I had it, I drew it on--”

He comes to an abrupt stop, twisting to stare down the gravel ruts of the driveway. “The sword,” he says slowly. “I need the sword. _Now._ ”

“Uh, okay.” Dean holds his hands up. “Let’s just--”

Sam’s scowling between them both. “What the hell is--”

“Grigori,” Castiel interjects. He splays out his fingers, and curls them into a fist.

“A what now?” Dean’s asking, but he’s watching the horizon. They all are.

There's a single moment of stillness: a weak wind teasing through the dry weeds, and the crunch of gravel as Castiel presses his weight into the balls of his feet. Smoke breaks away from the dusty line of Nebraska hills, a snaking column of roiling black against the blue of a late summer sky. It looks to be miles off; then yards; then feet, within a disorienting stretch of seconds.

When it connects with the ground the plume explodes outward like a dust cloud. Sam brings a hand up to shield his face, but it flows around him like a thick, oily fog, _reeking_ of sulfur.

A voice from inside the cloud calls out. “ _There_ you are.”

As the fog dissipates, Sam gets his first view of a woman: crisp business suit and high heels, lipstick in a ‘don’t fuck with me’ shade of red, and one manicured eyebrow raised in delighted surprise. She turns her gaze to Castiel.

“Well, what do we have here? _Slumming it_ with the cattle? How undignified.”

The trenchcoat unfolds with the rise of Castiel’s shoulders, and there’s a faint smell of ozone building under the cloying reek of sulfur. He speaks in a low, rolling growl: “Back away from me, Sytry.”

She barks a laugh. “Ha! Why? What are you going to do with that? Shock me?”

She waves a hand, and Sam hears Dean get pitched—bodily—into the gravel a couple yards away. Sam gets off one shot himself before he’s slamming into the side of the trailer and going down in a sprawl of limbs. He’s a quick shot, but not that quick. It’s a miss.

As Sam’s head is colliding with aluminum siding, Castiel’s moving, scuffed business shoes sliding in gravel as he lunges forward in one smooth motion. He shoves a forearm into her chest, throwing her back a half-step, and follows it with a right hook to the jaw.

It looks—and sounds—like it hits hard. The woman reels and stumbles back a few steps, wiping at her mouth. “Oh, you _do_ know how to treat a lady, don’t you?” She spits something wet onto the ground. Columbo lunges at her again.

The demon moves in the way Sam would expect for a girl that size: quick steps and lots of fast, well-placed punches. A little more grace than the usual demonic bar-room brawl style, but the strategy is expected. It’s Castiel that disorients him. He moves like a heavyweight champ; takes the little rabbit punches, plants his feet slow and swings hard. It’s surreal, a guy that scrawny moving with the sure-footedness of somebody ten times his size. He’s got the oomph to back it up, because every hit he lands gives her a good rattle. Still, she’s landing a hell of a lot more, and the gravel’s doing its little jig with each blow.

Sam gets himself half upright; Dean’s watching him, and gives a small nod towards the trunk, mimes a stabbing motion. Must be where he stashed the sword.

Sam nods, and moves to scrape the Beretta out from where it skidded under the plastic skirting of the trailer.

“You know, you remind me of someone.” Lady is monologuing, weaving out of Castiel’s reach. She doesn’t look phased by the exertion. “You’ve got that same smell: sandalwood, loyalty, with a dash of that ‘earnest righteousness’ _je ne sais quoi_. What was her name? Always hanging around the gardens in Babylon. With the eyes?”

It must be a familiar one, because Castiel's dropping the footwork and lunging for her throat. " _You know her name._ "

She buries an elbow in his neck, and plunges a grasping hand into the space behind his shoulder. Whatever she’s looking for, she finds it. Her fingers curl into a fist that she wrenches aside, hard.

They hit the gravel, and then a sound like the high-pitched whine of tinnitus amplified a thousand times over bursts over them, reverberating through the steel of the Beretta between Sam’s fingers. Sam’s hands are flying up on instinct to cover his ears, but it doesn’t dull the sound. Dean catches the dissonant frequency between clenched teeth and fumbles with the trunk cover.

Castiel sags onto the dirt with a wounded kind of whine. The woman buries a knee between his shoulders, pulling an invisible line taut between clawed fingers in a bizarre mime. “Well, don’t worry, dear. You’ll see each other ag—”

Another gunshot. A neat hole punches through the demon’s powersuit, just below the ribs.

Sam waits patiently for her to turn, then follows through with two more: a shot through the collarbone, ruining the neat line of her lapel. The second hits two inches lower, a little to the right. Heart and lung territory.

“Alright,” she says, pulling her bloodied jacket straight. Blood spills, bright and fresh, through the holes in the fabric. She doesn’t seem to mind. “If the children _insist_ that they get some attention, I can _certainly_ provide—“

But Dean’s moving on Sam’s periphery, and Sam raises his aim to make three quick pulls on the trigger. Two shots impact on her skull with a wet smack and a flash of white bone. The last wings her ear, but hey, it was a good streak.

She looms large over Sam, painted in the rich red of blood and the reek of sulfur – and then she’s twisting aside, teeth bared in a shriek. Dean carries the shortsword smoothly through the rest of its arc, and what would’ve cut spinal cord ends up carving a crooked path from shoulder to breastbone, flaying open cloth to flesh to bone. The blade comes to a rest at Dean’s hip, blade shining black with blood.

She _sparks_ , so that Sam can—for a moment—see the skeleton underneath the skin. Then she gives a guttural gasp and dusts off into a black cloud.

Dean braces his hands against his knees and breathes. “What the hell was that.”

“Grigori,” Sam repeats, not sure if he believes it or not. Big friggin’ demon, though. That he does believe. He checks the clip on the gun – 4 left – and the sky for any more plumes of demon-smoke before he pulls himself to his feet.

“Its name is _Gregory?_ ”

“He said ‘grigori’. Y’know, the fallen angels. The ones that jumped ship from Heaven with Satan. ’course that requires there being angels. And, y’know, Satan—“ He drifts off the Bible lesson and waves a hand towards Castiel, still sprawled in the dirt. “Is, uh—is he alive?”

By the puffs of dust blooming where he’s gasping, yeah. His fingers are spread wide and loose in the gravel. With a slow imprecision he brings them into a fist, grinding together the captured rocks with pops and squeaks.

“Yo! Cas-dude.” Dean kneels down beside him, looking for a visible injury. “Where are you hurt? Is it the stitches?”

Castiel mutters, “’srafiel” in a cloud of dust. Then the sword must dip into his half-lidded vision, because Castiel lashes out with an abrupt but clumsy hand, wrapping gritty and shaking fingers around Dean’s wrist to keep the weapon back and away.

“Um.” Dean gives Sam a helpless shrug, and sets the sword down. “I’m not gonna hurt you. I just need to see how bad you’re hurt.”

He gives Dean a hazed once-over before dropping his arm. He speaks in huffed syllables: “Don’t. I'm not.”

Sam’s a giant looming over Dean’s shoulder, attention split between the horizon and their new guest. “What’d she do?”

Castiel shakes his head. There’s fresh blood blooming under the skin of his jaw, a good bruise in the making. “She’ll come back,” he mutters to somewhere around Dean’s shoe.

“Okay, well then”—Dean reaches under Castiel’s arm and hauls him upright—“let’s get out of here.”

Sam ducks into the trailer to get the gear. Castiel jerks away from him as soon as he’s vertical, but he’s just as soon propping himself up on the Impala’s trunk, smearing out a streak of road dust with his palm. He clamps a hand against his chest, digging nails into the meat of his shoulder with a grimace.

Dean collects the sword he’d set aside, scrubs some of the blood off with dirt. It comes out gleaming. With a couple seconds consideration, he flips the blade and offers the handle towards Columbo. He accepts it wordlessly, tucks it away into some hidden inner pocket of the trenchcoat.

There’s still a dead body in the trailer. As Sam steps out with their gear, he hefts a canister of salt and a jug of accelerant. “You think it’s overkill?”

Sam shakes his head. “More the better. That badge looked pretty real.”

Awesome.

By the time Dean’s got the corpse salted and a good blaze going, Sam’s got the Impala packed up and ready to go. But he’s not heading for it. He’s staring at the cop car by the end of the road. “I recognize that car from town. Willing to bet they followed me here.”

“They’re looking for me,” Castiel mutters from where he’s leaning, pale, against the fender. “Here.” He sways forward abruptly, laying his hands out flat against both their chests.

“Hey, whoa--“ Sam starts; Dean goes to pull back, but there’s already what feels like fire searing along the lines of his ribs. He presses a hand into the bones, trying to smother the burn.

“ _Ow._ What the hell was that?”

“Sigils,” Castiel says, and sways back against the trunk. “She saw your faces. She’ll know your names. Now you’re hidden.”

Sam’s glancing down his own shirt, but the skin is unblemished. “Hidden, like—“

“They won’t be able to locate you by any arcane means. Angels or demons.”

“Yeah, well, don’t – no. No more of -- that.” Dean rubs at his ribs and gives one more miserable, “Ow.”

Castiel ignores him.

Sam squints against the morning sun. “I’ve had this car since Breckenridge. Probably shouldn’t leave it here. I can drop off the cop at the next hospital I find, ditch the car someplace there isn’t another dead cop. Come pick me up in, what, five, six hours? On Route 34, two miles west of that town with nothing but shitty tacos. Y’know the one.”

“Yeah, I know the one.” Dean turns his head. “Alright. Five hours.”

Sam heads for his borrowed piece of shit Toyota, which leaves shotgun open. Dean props open the door and waves a hand. Castiel climbs in without comment. By the time Dean’s falling into the driver’s seat he’s slouched against the door, hands folded neatly in his lap.

Sam heads east. Dean heads west.

They leave behind twin columns of thick black smoke, rising slowly towards blue Nebraska sky.

 

 

 

 


	2. Part I

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A series of roadside chats.

_Can you hear me in the rain, God? I am standing with this boy here who thinks an army at war is a reasonable thing. He thinks a soldier is something more than the uniform he is wearing. He thinks we live in a sane life and time, which you know as well as I is not what you designed for us sinners._  
—E.L. Doctorow, _The March_  


 

 

WRAY, CO  
 _2006-08-29 02:07 PM_

Sam Winchester makes a hard hitchhiker to miss: six and a half foot of lanky perched on a guardrail, freakishly long legs sprawled out in front of him, head buried in a book. Dean scoffs as he pulls onto the gravel. Castiel doesn’t shift from where he’s been passed out in shotgun for most of the drive, sweaty forehead pressed up against the glass. His hand is still curled loosely into the curve of his collarbone. Dean’d asked; got a terse ‘fine’ for an answer. Whatever it is, it’s not ripped open or bleeding or blatantly dislocated, so there’s not much Dean can do about it.

 _Bleeding like a stuck pig_. So the demon had said.

He gives an uneasy glance towards the backseat. It’s clean. ‘cause he hadn’t been bleeding much; not like a stuck pig, no. His jerryrigged compress had done its job keeping his leather interior blood-free.

Unless it’s something he can’t see.

Dean shakes his head and grabs at the door handle.

Sam is shoving his book back into the knapsack between his knees and creaking to his feet. “Run into anything?”

“Nah. You?”

Sam shakes his head, nods towards the passenger door. “How’s the guest?”

“Sleeping it off.”

“Huh.” Sam moves towards the trunk. “I left Bobby a voicemail. Said we’d be a few more days.”

“You tell him about—“ he twitches his chin towards the passenger.

“Little bit. Nothing much.”

“What do you think? Lay low a few days, wait to see if that Gregory chick makes a comeback—“

“Grigori,” Sam corrects, immediately. Poor kid can’t help himself. “If grigori even exist, I mean, the implications would just be—“ He waves a hand, cutting himself off. “Whatever she is, that sword lit her up like the Fourth of July. We’ve gotta talk to this guy.”

Christ. He’s already going full geek out on this shit, and Dean hasn’t even gotten into this whole—feathers—bullshit. Hopefully Columbo keeps sleeping.

“Yeah, well, he’s all yours. Good luck. Guy has a two-word vocabulary, when he’s not unconscious.” He tilts his head back, taking in the heat of the sun. “How was Denver?" He leaves an eyebrow waggle to make his true point.

Sam drops the trunk closed. He keeps his hands pressed against the finish. “She’s going back to Stanford.” He’s still for a minute, then shrugs. “Expected, I guess. They’ve rebuilt a lot, and she’s already a year behind.”

Shit. Dean drops back against the trunk, arms crossed. “We can talk to Bobby, pick up a few Cali jobs. Whose territory is that, these days?”

“Sarah Langley.”

Dean groans. There aren’t many section leaders he gets along with, but Sarah Langley - she’s a royal bitch.

“Yeah,” Sam says ruefully.

“Whatever. You need some sun, anyway. Lookin’ pasty.”

“Haha,” Sam answers dryly, but any further retort cuts off when Sam’s phone gives the quick ting of a text message notification. Dean’s is echoing it a few seconds later. It’s a familiar text - he’s gotten it twice already today:

      **FROM** : ⏏⏏⏏⏏⏏⏏  
      **MSG** : ⏏⏏⏏⏏⏏ ⏏⏏⏏ ⏏⏏⏏

Sam shows him his own screen. Same thing. “Gotten three of them in the last few hours.”

“Yeah, same. Probably the same time, too.”

There’s a couple seconds of silence – each running through their own personal lists of cell phone-infecting ghouls, and coming up short – before Dean sits upright. “Oh, hey – check this out.” He digs through his back pocket, comes up with the flask he’d wrestled the demon for. There’s a clean imprint of each of his fingers in the metal.

“Badass, huh? I think I kinda like it better this way.”

Sam turns it over, eyebrows raised skeptically. “I’m guessing this is why your hand is sixteen shades of purple?” He gestures the flask with a slosh towards his right hand.

“Eh, whatever. I got a souvenir.”

“Anyone ever tell you your kind of optimism is a little disturbing?”

“It’s alright to be jealous, Sammy,” Dean answers with a shit-eating grin, and moves towards the driver’s door. “Someday you’ll be a man too.”

Sam lobs the flask across the roof of the car. It clangs against the back of Dean’s head.

“You _bitch--_ ”

♤ ♤ ♤

HORSE CREEK, WY  
 _2006-08-29 11:37 PM_

Sam wakes to a mouthful of upholstery and the sound of gravel snapping against the Impala’s undercarriage.

“There’s nothing here,” Dean’s saying.

“That’s preferable,” Castiel says back.

Sam’s blurred vision resolves to Dean giving Castiel a sidelong glance. There’s a long stretch of tarmac drifting off into black ahead of the Impala’s headlights. “You gonna puke? ‘cause if you’re gonna puke--”

“No,” Castiel answers, and pushes open the door.

Sam brushes a hand against his mouth. “Where are we?”

“Middle of nowhere, Wyoming,” Dean mutters. “C’mon, he’s being all - weird again.” He follows Castiel out into the dark.

Out in the insect ruckus of the night Sam drops back against the fender, rubbing the last bits of dream-fugue out of his eyes. He’s losing the last bits of a dream in pieces, but it’s left a lingering sourness in his mouth, and the asphalt feels strange under his feet. Pliant.

Castiel makes a strange figure himself, walking up the white line of the road’s edge in small measured steps. He stops at the fringe of the Impala’s headlights, takes four steps back, and then lies down on the asphalt, head towards the double-yellow, toes towards the gravel shoulder.

“There any mental facilites in North Platte?” Sam asks casually.

Dean huffs. “If there are, we cheated ‘em out of a customer.” He pushes off from the fender.

“’We’?” Sam mutters, and follows at a slower pace.

They come to a stop in the middle of the road, above Castiel’s head. Sam looks up the length of it. Straight blacktop as far as the eye can see. Which isn’t far, on a moonless night. “This is a trucking road, y’know,” Dean says.

“We haven’t encountered a vehicle in 47 miles,” Castiel answers flatly. His eyes are closed. “But I trust you’ll warn me.”

Dean ‘hms’ noncommittally, watches a few more seconds in silence. “What are you doing, meditating?”

“No,” Castiel answers.

“Communing with the gods? What?”

“I’m repairing something.” He cracks an eye to stare at Dean. “This will go much faster if you’re silent.”

Dean throws his arms out in a shrug. Castiel drops his eyes closed again.

Sam elbows Dean in the side, and gestures towards Castiel’s bandage. There’s a thin blue-white glow filtering between the threads of the gauze.

“Uh. Hey, Cas-ti--uh. Cas, buddy, you look like you’re leaking.”

Castiel ignores him.

They’d had the ‘angel’ conversation over burgers at a shitty Wyoming diner. (Castiel hadn’t eaten; claiming he didn’t ‘require nutrients.’ Dean had asked him if he was a plant.) Dean had met the subject with contempt, Sam with polite skepticism, but Castiel hadn’t seemed to care. If he’s mental, he’s a convinced mental. One that leaks light on Wyoming backroads.

Dean paces the distance between the reflectors set into the asphalt; Sam drops his hands into his pockets and watches Castiel.

He extends his right arm out, keeping it parallel to the double yellow, palm down towards the asphalt. Then he reaches with his left hand into the empty space above his right shoulder. He feels slowly along, not touching, just ghosting his fingertips a few inches off the asphalt.

He stops his roaming, fingers tracing slowly over the same three-inch wide patch of air for ten, fifteen seconds. His jaw is set tight, mouth drawn into a thin line.

The headlights of the Impala brighten up. Dean stops his pacing. Sam can hear the thin whine of the alternator speeding up under the rumble of the idling engine.

Castiel braces his right hand to the pavement, arches the fingers of his left hand, and shoves at something Sam can’t see.

Blue fingers of static arc across the pavement, skittering out in both directions from Castiel. They snap across Sam’s shoes, sending him jerking back in surprise, and catch on the fender of the Impala to brighten the lights - almost blinding - before they sputter and the Impala’s engine cuts out, plunging them into darkness.

The static races back towards Castiel, lightning-bright in the dark, and coalesces for one brief moment into a living electric painting of--

Wings.

Immense wings, stretching ten, fifteen feet in either direction of the 5-foot-nothing tax accountant sprawled on the pavement. Castiel’s fingers are pressed into the apex of the right wing, where a storm of white sparks spits and hisses. It’s off axis, the line not connecting cleanly with the rest of the… bone? What would be bone, Sam thinks, if the anatomy is true to a bird’s. Castiel shoves again. The profile snaps into place, goes straight, but not before Castiel seizes up, teeth gritted, and the air shakes with a sound like the one they’d heard at the trailer - deafening white noise, reverberating in the corners of Sam’s skull - when the demon had been drawing an invisible line taut over Castiel’s back, tearing with clawed fingers at-- this. At the wing.

By Dean’s grimace, he hears it too.

The static disperses in a rush of acrid air. The Impala shudders back to life, headlights throwing the pavement into sodium-halide reality. Castiel rolls gingerly to an upright position, one hand already back to the familiar rub at his shoulder.

Sam and Dean share disbelieving stares over his head.

“You, uh.” Sam clears his throat. “You have wings.”

“On some planes,” Castiel answers.

“Looked broken,” Sam continues awkwardly. “Is that what the demon was, uh, yanking--?”

“Yes. But it was already broken.” Slowly, he pushes to his knees, and then his feet. Dean is at Sam’s shoulder, and they’re both watching.

“I think you’re more willing to listen now,” he says. The brothers exchange another look; Castiel looks to Dean, and continues: “You asked the wrong question before.”

“About what?”

“You asked how to do what I had done,” he answers, speaking slow. “I didn’t lie; you can’t destroy demons the way I did. But I’ve read your grimoires, the works of Solomon. There’s much that’s been lost to your kind. Things I can teach you. Sigils, rites. Weapons.”

“Yeah?” Dean asks. “In exchange for what?”

Castiel’s silent for awhile. “Your help.”

Dean crosses his arms. “Angel of the Lord needs help, huh?”

Sam throws his brother a look. “Help with what?”

“Hunting a traitor.”

“You mean an – angel traitor.”

“Yes.”

Silence ticks by. Dean gives an impatient twitch of his shoulders. “Can you elaborate, a little? This whole--” he waves a vague hand towards the pavement “—thing is new to us.”

“Someone’s writing false orders. Sending angels into places where Grigori are waiting. I don’t know who they are, or what rank.”

Dean turns his head. “I’m guessing they know who you are.”

He nods. “They trapped me in North Platte, grounded me - left me to the demons. I have to find them and expose them, _now_ , before they realize their mistake.”

“And you need our help because--?”

“I’m—incapacitated.” He gestures towards the empty space behind his shoulder.

“There aren’t any other, uh—“ Sam hangs up on the word, still disbelieving. “--angels you trust?”

“There are,” Castiel says. “But anyone I involve would be put at risk.”

Dean raises his eyebrows. “Which would include... us.”

“Humans are inconsequential to my kind,” Castiel says. “They’ll ignore you, and anyone with you. Help me get the proof I need. I’ll teach you what I know. It’s a reasonable exchange.” He pauses. “Please.”

Dean leans back onto the hood, arms crossed. “’Please’, he says.” But it’s clear enough he’s already made up his mind.

Sam asks: “Where would you need to go?”

“Utah. Grantsville.”

Dean groans. “Grantsville? What in the hell is in Grantsville?”

“1253 Amarillo Lane,” Castiel recites precisely.

 

 

 

 


	3. Part III

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A Utah apartment. Cas tries a burrito. Sam makes a new acquaintance.

  


_She heard below the music the sound of the soldiers' footsteps all in rhythm, a soft sound... it was almost a hush, and if not for the cries of the sergeants at the side, and their pennants in the air to remind her, she would think it was so sad, these men with their rifles on their shoulders making a show of their victory but looking to her eyes like they was indentured as she once was, though maybe not born into it._  
—E.L. Doctorow, _The March_  


 

 

GRANTSVILLE, UT  
 _2006-08-30 10:23 AM_

1253 Amarillo Lane is a squat, dimly-lit apartment building that smells like mothballs and decay. If there are tenants, there aren’t many; the only noise is the rattle of a decrepit air conditioner at the end of the hall as Dean leans against the doorframe of Apartment B.

He turns his head, traces a thumb over a small sigil burnt into the dark oak above the doorjamb. “Demons?”

Cas answers with a disinterested “Yes” and keeps parsing through the random junk scattered in his palm.

Sam’s watching the entryway, one arm casually back to put his pistol within easy reach. Cas is picking carefully through the pockets of his trenchcoat, coming up with bits of paper and a hodgepodge of trinkets - coins, seashells, the brass shine of an empty .44-caliber casing - that Dean hadn't even seen when he`d searched the thing. There must be pockets hidden within pockets in there. Then again, Dean isn't entirely sure where he keeps stashing away that sword, either.

He comes up with a small key, and slips it into the lock. The door swings wide with a smooth click. There isn't even a deadbolt.

There are symbols lining the inside of the doorway, floor to ceiling. Some Dean knows, some he doesn't; some look like they’re cobbled together from a half-dozen separate seals. Of the ones he recognizes, they’re all demon deterrents.

The room itself is small, and cluttered: a desk, a couple filing cabinets, and a small table set back against dirty windows occupy most of the floor space. There’s paper and bits and pieces of electronics – cell phones, laptops, and what looks to be a Commodore 64 - scattered across the table, manila folders fat with papers stacked high on the desk.

On the wall, there’s a sigil Dean doesn’t recognize, painted in the dull rust of dried blood. He doesn’t even recognize the lettering.

“Enochian,” Castiel says, following his stare.

“What’s it for?”

Cas is quiet for a second, then he says: “Angels.”

“Ah, right. Problems in the fam.” So angels play by some kind of rules. He makes a mental note to tell Sam.

Another long silence. Dean pulls a file out of the stack and lays it open. It’s a printout of an FBI work-up; he’s stolen enough to know the look of it. It’s a young woman, early 20s, blonde, pretty - Sarah Angston. Reported missing October 3rd, 2005 from Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania. There’s something written in a string of Enochian sigils next to her name, and another handwritten date: February 18th, 2006. Cas points towards the Enochian. “Israfiel. She was in my garrison. This was her vessel.” He stops, considering. “This began with my search for her.”

The Greg chick had said, ‘ _You remind me of someone._ ’ And ‘ _What was her name?_ ’

Israfiel, maybe.

Castiel is pointing towards the pile on the desk. “All of those are angels who have failed to report in. 47, in all. We’ve found 27 of them. Dead, vessels and angels both. The rest, no sign. For 23 of them, we’ve found that their final orders had - discrepancies.” He hesitates. “24, now. I was told to report to North Platte, Nebraska. I’m sure if I followed that trail, I would find much the same evidence. No issuing officer. No stated objective.”

He glances towards the blood sigil on the wall. “I knew, with the orders, it had to be an angel, someone with access to our communications.” He pauses. “Now I have proof.”

Dean starts sifting through the high-tech yard sale scattered across the table. “What’s with all this stuff? You don’t seem like much of a computer guy.” Having watched him puzzling over the radio knobs on the Impala, Dean’s feeling pretty sound in that assessment.

“It’s my brother’s hobby.”

‘Brother’ seems to be a loose term in Castiel’s vocabulary, more in the creepy cult sense of the term than the familial one. Dean glances up. “You’re working with somebody?”

Castiel just keeps on shuffling papers. “I was.”

There’s a folder sitting out of place, one manila corner sticking up from beneath the innards of an old sat phone. Dean picks it up, flips to the cover page: James Novak, 31, smiles up from the page. Reported missing from Pontiac, Illinois on October 5th, 2005. He’s got a wife - Amelia - and a daughter - Claire.

Like the rest, there’s a name written in Enochian, and a date. August 29, 2006. Yesterday.

Dean holds the paper up. “Looks like somebody added you to the list.”

Castiel looks up from his pile. His expression draws into a frown, and then neutralizes out into his usual look of mild displeasure.

“So, you _were_ working with somebody, or--”

“Here.” He holds out a hand. Dean gives the folder over, watches with curiosity as Castiel scrawls something out in hard lines of Enochian.

“What’s that say?”

Castiel gives him a stare.

Dean throws up his hands. “Alright, alright. Personal, I get it.”

He drops back against the table, watches Castiel shuffle. “What’re you trying to find?”

“Sabachiel.”

“A what?”

“He serves as second-in-command to one of my superiors, Zachariah. He was waiting for me when I arrived in North Platte.” Castiel plies an unconscious hand against his shoulder. Dean can guess what the guy was waiting for.

Castiel pulls a sheaf of papers free. “He was missing for three days in June, but he returned; we removed him from the case.”

“So, what, you think they converted him? Some kinda double agent?”

“He’s involved.”

Deadpan, every time. Cas kills all the espionage vibe.

“If I can find him, bring him before the Council to testify—“ He falls back, staring at the paper-strewn desk with a frown. “But he doesn’t have the access to generate falsified orders.”

“Who’d have that?”

Castiel considers the desk for a long time. “Zachariah.”

♤ ♤ ♤

ELKO, NV: OUTSKIRTS  
 _2006-08-31 07:42 AM_

Castiel considers the object before his nose with uncertainty. The tortilla wrap of grease, homogenized chicken egg and gray-colored meat rotates slowly in his vision as Dean gives it a small shake. “C’mon. Try it.”

“I don’t—“

“You tell me one more time that you don’t require sustenance I will kick your ass.” Dean considers, and then revises: “I will try very, very hard to kick your ass.”

Reluctantly, he takes the offered substance.

Dean watches unblinking for three, four seconds as Castiel studies the breakfast burrito more closely. At last, he bursts out, “Hey, remember who’s driving your ass to California. You owe me this. One bite.”

Restraining a sigh, Castiel does as asked.

Dean watches in an expectant silence Castiel has come to know well. Today, he makes it fifteen seconds before asking: “So?”

“It’s—“ He searches for a word, and settles on, “Dripping.”

“It’s grease. It’s good for you.” Dean waits. When it’s clear Castiel won’t be attempting a second bite, he reclaims the wrap with a noise of disgust. “You just wait. Two millennia from now, you’re gonna be sitting up on your cloud and you’re gonna have this huge craving for a breakfast burrito and you’re gonna be heartbroken you didn’t monopolize on this opportunity.” He takes a large bite before continuing on through a mouthful of egg and cheese: “This is the pinnacle of human culinary arts.”

“I believe you said that about yesterday’s Philadelphia cheese steak sandwich,” Castiel notes dryly.

“Yeah, well, we’ve had a lot of pinnacles.”

He finishes the burrito in several prodigious mouthfuls, balls the wrapper in his fist, and deposits the trash through the Impala’s open window. Squinting towards the morning sun, he wipes the grease from his hands onto the not entirely clean fabric of his jeans. “Alright, Cas, here’s your problem.”

What had begun as abortive attempts at his name (‘Cas-tee-el’, ‘Cas-dude’) has at some point become solely ‘Cas.’ Now it’s all Dean Winchester calls him by. He supposes it’s preferable to mispronunciation.

They’re standing on the outskirts of a small Nevada city, facing the downward slope of dirt and scrub-brush leading towards a dry riverbed. Dean is intent upon giving Castiel a lesson on the hunters’ method of combat, in what Castiel supposes is some attempt at repayment for the knowledge he’s sharing with them; or possibly an attempt at convincing Castiel that there is worth to their own method of fighting.

“You plant your feet,” Dean is saying. “You never, y’know - _dodge._ You just take the hit.”

“Damage can be repaired,” Castiel says.

“Okay, sure. Says the guy with a stab wound.”

“Different circumstance, and a different weapon.”

He hasn’t explained to them that that particular wound is self-inflicted. It would likely initiate another exhausting line of query from Sam.

“Yeah, well, I haven’t seen you fight with that sword, but I’ll tell you, your hand-to-hand sucks. That chick was all over you. You got hits in, yeah, but she was giving five to every one of yours. You’ve gotta play some kinda defense. Here.”

Dean lines up against him, folds his hands into loose fists and begins to carry through a practiced sparring method. The motions are somewhat slow, and orchestrated; Castiel dodges with ease. But an unexpected left hook catches him off guard, and Dean lands a solid blow, damaging his own hand in the process.

“ _Shit._ ” He shakes the hand loose, grimacing. “Okay. Ow. My point still stands. You’re focusing too much on one hand. The sword hand, I’m guessing?” He waves his right as evidence. “But you’ve gotta pay attention to both.

“What we need to teach you,” Dean says with a grin, “is how to _brawl_.”

♤ ♤ ♤

ELKO, NV: STARLITE MOTEL  
 _2006-08-31 08:26 AM_

Sam hovers with his face three inches off the table, waiting for the crack of shattering plastic from the wire casings between his fingers. Against all odds, it’s a fit; the cable snaps neatly into place.

He drops back on his elbows, surveying his handiwork.

When he’d cracked open the warped shell of Castiel’s discarded cellphone, the SIM card had been in pieces, the board fried, but the internal memory had looked mostly intact. With enough cobbled together pieces off of one of Dad’s old burners he’s got most of a phone scattered across the scratched linoleum of the tabletop. After a long press of the power button, he finds there’s even enough juice left in the battery to get it going. Someone’s smiling on him.

He taps his fingers through the load-up screen, taking a glance towards the motel door. After almost an hour of fitting cables together, he’s got another half an hour, forty-five minutes tops before Dean and Cas are back. Best to have this little bout of subterfuge cleaned up before then.

Any missed voicemails or texts while the phone was out of commission are moot with the dead SIM card, but the contacts come through, and old texts slowly populate through the list. It’s a pleasant surprise. Sam hadn’t pictured Cas as much of a texter.

He pulls out a notepad and starts slowly parsing through the contact list. It’s kind of a disappointment; the phone numbers are a hodgepodge of alphabets - Arabic, Korean, Cyrillic - rather than numbers, and none of them the right length for a 10-digit format. Some kind of encryption? He isn’t sure. The names are the same random jumble, some of them displaying only in the empty blocks of corrupted symbols.

He moves on to texts. Each one seems to be a different language: Spanish, German, Japanese (one, a media message of a sneering bald man in a pin-neat suit: the caption is ‘tous grêle roi de la chauve’). Hell, half are in Coptic, except for the last two received:

      **FROM** : ☦☤☬☸❈✵  
      **MSG** : 41.134533 -100.758071  
     Aug. 29 06 12:43 AM

      **FROM** : ☦☤☬☸❈✵  
      **MSG** : where are you?  
     Aug. 29 06 3:15 AM

The first is the right format for degree decimal coordinates; they both share the same random conglomeration of symbols for the sender. He marks down the coordinates and a careful recreation of the sender’s name. If it even is a name.

That’s as far as he gets before the battery on Dad’s burner runs out and the screen goes abruptly blank. With a muttered “Ah, crap”, he starts digging through the box of old phones and tangled power cords for the right charger. The sudden tinny bugle of a ringtone startles him, but it’s not the Frankenphone on the table that’s ringing. It’s his phone, buried under all the wires. It’s an incoming call, Bobby.

“’bout time.” He tucks the phone against his shoulder, reaching back into the rat’s nest of chargers. “Hey, Bobby.” But the other end is just silence - the low buzz of static. “Bobby?”

There’s two, three beats of more static silence before deafening white noise blares out of the earpiece. Sam drops the phone with a jerk of surprise. It bounces off the carpet and lands screen up. It still reads ‘Incoming call: Bobby S’. After a few more seconds spitting static, the call drops and the screen resolves smoothly to the home screen. It sits quiet for a few seconds, then buzzes: new text message.

Sam stares at the thing for a few seconds before nudging it back to within arms’ reach with a socked toe and picking it up. It’s the same junk text they’ve been getting since Nebraska, except--

      **FROM** : ⏏⏏⏏⏏⏏⏏  
      **MSG** : WHERE

Except for the message. Uncorrupted.

Sam takes an uneasy glance towards the cobbled together phone on the table in front of him.

He’s reaching to pull the battery on his own phone when it starts in on a second rendition of the Imperial March.

     Incoming call: Bobby S.

Sam accepts the call with the phone at arms’ length. After a few beats without a white noise bomb, he cautiously thumbs on the speakerphone. There’s just silence, under the static spit of an open line. Two, three seconds pass.

Then Sam’s own voice crawls out of the receiver, washed out in static and halting and skipping like a bad recording. “Dean p-p-picked someth—cked someone up in Nor-r-r-rth Platte. Like Salina, Akron, y’k-k-know the ones. I’m—Dean picked someone up in-n-n Nor—Bobby, it’s Sam. D-D-D-Dean pick—on the road--‘b-b-b-b—Salina, Akron—we’re on the r-r-r-r-oad—Dean picked som-m-meone up in North Platte—“

It’s a piecemeal copy of the voicemail he’d left Bobby on some Colorado back road, yesterday. Except protocol isn’t to say some _one_ on a recording. Protocol is to say some _thing_.

Just as abruptly, the call drops.

Another text.

      **FROM** : ⏏⏏⏏⏏⏏⏏  
      **MSG** : PLEASE

With that, Sam does pull the battery.

He jerks to his feet and tears apart the Frankenphone for good measure, cracking a few of the cable casings in the process. How the hell could something track him through a phone without a SIM card? Except they’ve been getting those messages for days - ever since North Platte. Ever since Dean had picked Cas up. Maybe just fishing at first, reaching out in whatever code that ruined phone had used to any cell within range, trying to make contact with --

Electricity snaps through the mess of wires on the table. The battery resting in his hand gives the same static snap, biting sharply into the meat of his palm. Sam drops it with a jerk that’s half-startle, half-spasm, just as a quick rush of wind washes through the musty air of the motel room. It’s got the hard-edged scent of ozone.

There’s a kid standing just inside a door that’s locked, bolted and salted. Sam doesn’t think he should be particularly surprised by that.

He looks college age, baggy clothes and slouched shoulders and shaggy hair. There’s a solidity to the way his feet are planted and an overbright desperation to his eyes that ruins any naiveté that shabby freshman look gives him.

Sam brushes an elbow against his side, freeing up his shirt for a reach to the gun in his belt. “It’s polite to knock.”

The kid’s throat works a second. “I’m looking for my brother.” He looks surprised at his own audacity.

“And you think I’ve seen him?”

His shoulders hitch up a few more inches, expression tightening. “On the phone. You said.”

Sam shows his hands. “Bad start. Hi, I’m Sam. The one whose phone you’ve been tapping, apparently. You are?”

“You’re a hunter,” he accuses. “You said--”

“I said we’d found something, yeah.”

“Like Akron. And Salina,” the kid answers. He takes quick, ticking glances at the far corners of the room. “Where is he?”

Sam inclines his head. “Your brother, you mean.”

He’s thinking there’s not much of a family resemblance, up until that high-pitch ringing starts up in his ears, dragging every hair on his skin upright. The ceiling light overhead starts to brighten up as the kid rises onto his toes and says: “If you _hurt_ him--”

“Take it easy, alright?” The air keeps humming, but Sam keeps his voice level. “He’s fine, I swear on that. We’ve been giving him a hand.”

The kid stares at him, tight-mouthed.

“He asked us to help him look into something,” Sam elaborates.

He gives a brisk shake of his head. “We don’t talk to you.”

“He decided to make an exception.”

“For what?”

“Look, much as I’d like to, I can’t tell you that.” He’d said he’s one of Cas’s ‘brothers’, and the light show and disregard for warding has Sam inclined to believe him. But by Castiel’s telling, he’s got enemies on both sides of the aisle. “He doesn’t seem keen on interacting with you. The, uh - Host. As it were.”

Despite the static hum singing under Sam’s skin, despite the rising burn of ozone in the air - the kid abruptly fits perfectly into the human suit he’s wearing as his face falls into a frown that’s puzzled, bordering on hurt. “Why?”

“No offense, but I really can’t tell you that until I know who you are, and what you want.”

It’s not an answer he likes, by the way his shoulders twitch another inevitable inch upwards. His eyes are starting to roam again when they land on the mess of dead phones on the table. By the time Sam’s following the stare the air is shifting and the kid is right there, picking the shattered core of Cas’s phone out of the mess.

Sam tenses. “Hey, look--”

Electricity arcs between the kid’s knuckles, jumping through the rat’s nest of cables in loops and whorls, spitting lines of soot across the linoleum. The plastic crumbles under the kid’s tightening grip.

Sam takes two big steps back and pulls the gun free. He’s not sure it’ll do him much good.

“Tell me where he is,” the kid says quietly. The tinny whine of tension in his voice sets the windows shivering.

“If you’re trying to help him, we don’t have a problem. Alright?”

“ _Tell me where he is._ ”

That resonates in the floor under Sam’s feet. He thumbs off the safety and pulls the muzzle up to focus on the kid, mid-thigh. Nothing fatal. “I can’t.”

The bulb overhead brightens to a blinding white before it gives out in a shower of glass and sparks. Within that millisecond of bright flash the kid is in his face, iron-hard fingers bearing into his wrist.

“If you hurt him, if you hurt my brother, I’ll--”

“We didn’t,” Sam says.

“ _If you hurt him--_ ”

Something in his wrist gives with a sickening pop, sending a white-hot spark of pain spasming up his arm. The gun hits the floor hard, right around the same time Dean’s voice is cutting sharp through the thick air: “Let him go.”

Then Castiel’s, sharper still. “ _Nanael._ ”

Every ounce of holy righteousness deflates to a dishevelled college kid in the span of a second as he takes in the two standing in the doorway. “Brother.” He’s dropping Sam’s arm and closing the gap immediately, to the twitchy discomfort of Dean, who’s got his own Glock trained on the kid from his position at Castiel’s side. It’s Castiel that pushes Dean’s gun down.

The kid - Nanael - grabs Cas in an awkward hug, all bent elbows and stiff shoulders, then shoves him back to arms’ length and gives him an erratic once over. “You’re all dim. And your wing--”

Dean’s doing his own prodding at Sam’s wrist. Sam pulls back with a hiss. “Leave it--”

Nanael’s just as soon wheeling on him. “S-sorry, I-- here.” He grabs at Sam’s wrist with careful fingers. Sam and Dean are both jolting; Dean raises the Glock, but Sam’s hesitantly waving him off. Warmth spreads slowly under the kid’s touch, leaving a tingling numb in its wake. When Nanael lets go and he gives the wrist a flex, it bends smoothly. Good as new.

Sam clears his throat. “Uh, thanks. I guess.” Miracle healing. Just like that. Okay. That’s... that’s cool.

The kid smiles towards his shoelaces. Castiel breaks the moment, voice cold: “Nanael, you shouldn’t be here.”

“You’re two days late reporting in,” Nanael starts hesitantly, and then it’s off to the races: “Sandalphon was trying to delay on your behalf, but Zachariah already knew somehow, and now he’s asking the Seraphim for an official investigation, and after Balthazar and Adnachiel and the thing in Budapest-- Sandalphon is _furious_ , Castiel, I mean, y’know, furious in _his_ way, and the last I could find you was the park, and the _demons_ , and not even Uriel has the power to do that, I thought you were _dead_ and then this hunter, he had your phone--”

Castiel gives the phone a cursory glance, but disregards it. “You can’t be here.”

“You’re _hurt._ Your wing--”

“It will heal.”

“Let me call Sandalphon. He’ll set it right, he can--”

“Do _not_ tell Sandalphon of this,” Castiel snaps, and Nanael shrinks. Castiel stills, and softens his tone. “Please. I shouldn’t have involved you in this to begin with. Don’t involve anyone else. Just go.”

The dynamic resolves for Sam there. Hell, he’s lived it. The older brother and the false aire of control - and the obstinate little brother that refuses to be denied.

True to form, Nanael plants his heels. “This isn’t something you have to do alone. I found the orders, I can find the source--”

“Nanael, _please._ Go.”

Sam surprises them both when he interjects, “Wait.”

The two angels stare at him. Dean, too. Sam clears his throat. “On your phone. Uh-- sorry about that, by the way. But the last two texts you got. One was asking where you were, but the one before that, it was coordinates. For North Platte, maybe? They had the same sender.” He grabs the notepad off the table and shows its jumble of symbols to them both. Castiel’s expression hardens. Nanael’s twists into surprise. Sam hazards a guess: “From you, right? They’re both from you.”

Nanael’s already tugging his own phone free from his back pocket. “I didn’t--”

“I know,” Castiel says.

“They couldn’tve gotten into my system, not the same way, the garrison’s phones are on a private network. It had to have been someone that could access my phone, someone that could’ve--”

“ _Stop,_ ” Cas snaps. That one is for Sam and Nanael both, judging by the glare he’s getting. “Nanael.”

Nanael nods to the floor. “The garrison’s been reassigned; surveillance in Boston. But I’ll be listening.”

Castiel softens, dropping a hand on Nanael’s shoulder. “I’ll return as soon as I can.”

Whatever brotherly love there’d been vanishes with the kid. Castiel rounds on Sam, wrathful. “What were you doing? How did he track you?”

“Through a voicemail, I think. I mentioned North Platte in it. Guess that was enough for him to go on.” Sam retrieves his phone off the floor. “He’s pretty tech-savvy, huh?”

“Very.”

Dean’s the one to ask: “We need to worry about him?”

“No. But we need to worry about whoever might be watching him. We shouldn’t stay.” Castiel picks the remains of his cell phone from the table and grinds it into his fist. This time, there’s nothing left to salvage.

 

 

 

 


	4. Part IV

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cas has a chat with his boss. The she-devil returns.

_"I would not, yesterday, have thought you capable of this."_

_"I was not capable of it," I reply. "Yesterday."_  
—Steven Pressfield, _The Virtues of War_

  


 

VAN NUYS, CA  
 _2006-09-02 02:28 PM_

Apparently an office, by angel terms, is a tetanus-encrusted warehouse plastered in enough No Trespassing signs to re-wallpaper the Trump Tower. As Dean slips through the side entrance, California sunshine peels back to mold-flavored shadows. The inside is mostly concrete floor, dusty but unobstructed. The only structure is what looks to have been a managerial office, an 8-foot tall shack planted towards the warehouse’s edge, the pane-glass window that a boss had once lorded over now boarded up with plywood.

Dean’s halfway to calling Cas a bucket of crazy when he spots the trim-looking 30-something standing by the door, looking absurd amongst the dust and debris in a well-tailored three-piece suit. Apparently out-of-place business casual is a company policy.

Once the guard puts an eerily Cas-like stare on him, Dean crosses the space in quick, authoritative steps, badge out and mouth running: “Hi, there. OSHA. Occupational Safety? Just doing a routine chuck-up. You guys had a business permit out on this place and well, frankly, we weren’t able to find any contract work for takin’ care of that asbestos problem in here—“ He gestures towards the ceiling. Bare metal struts and peeling paint, mostly, but hell, he’s making this up as he goes.

The suit pulls his hands out of his pockets, letting them fall loose by his sides. He’s got the mild frown that seems to pass for angelic confusion. He follows Dean’s pointing finger impassively, then drops his cold stare back to Dean. “I’ll have to ask you to leave,” he says flatly.

“Well, y’know, federal officer and all, so you can’t really ask me to do much of anything. You _can_ tell me what kinda remedial-like steps you guys have taken, as pertains to the whole asbestos. Thing.” Damn. He probably should’ve let Sam take this part.

The angel is looking flatly suspicious, now. “Identify yourself properly.”

“Sure. To your superior, maybe?”

When they want to move, they move damn fast, angels. If any time passes between the guy standing ten feet away, hands slack, and him being right in Dean’s face with concrete fingers wrapped in his collar, Dean wasn’t able to perceive it. The angel turns his head, studying him. “You’re hidden to me. State your name, human.”

“Ok, hey! We’re cool.” Dean holds up his hands, pacifying. “Is there anybody else working here? One of your bros, maybe? See, my buddy was thinking there might be two of you, and it’d be _real_ awkward if—“

Dust scuffs up in a gust of wind, eddying around his feet. Dean twists around in the chokehold, and there’s a slim woman in a power suit right behind him, eyes narrow and cold. “Oh. Good,” Dean says. “Hi there. Sam?”

Cas’s rib art must work pretty well. The angels are both looking flatly astonished when they catch sight of Sam around the corner of the shack, jamming his bloodied hand onto the sigil on the floor.

A fierce wash of white light sears through the warehouse, chasing the suits out with it.

Dean straightens his collar as he waits for his vision to clear. “I’m gonna be blind by the end of this.”

The fuzzed silhouette of Sam rolls up the sheet of canvas they’d painted the sigil onto, tucking it into the backpack over his shoulder. “Damn, this stuff actually works.”

“Need one of these for demons, is what we need,” Dean mutters. He turns towards the far door, shouts: “Hey! Cas! All—“ He drifts off as he sees the Cas in question is already halfway across the warehouse floor, moving at a hurried pace. “All clear,” he finishes lamely.

“I noticed,” Cas says dryly, moving past Dean. “Thank you.”

“Sure. Love nuking total strangers.” He waves a hand towards the shack. “So this is it? Big angel boss office? He’s got some weird taste in architecture.”

“Yes.” Castiel is running his hands over the edges of the door, examining each edge closely. When he seems satisfied, he turns the knob and presses it open. Bright sunlight spills through the open door.

“Yeah, okay.” Dean leans around the corner, keeping his toes just this side of reality. The edges of a svelte corner-office spread out beyond the door, too bright and too big to be anywhere near the 8’x10’ shack it’s enclosed in. “How the hell does that work?”

“Earth is hardly a safe storage place for sensitive documents. So, we don’t store them on Earth,” Cas says, casual as always, and steps through.

Dean moves to follow, but holds a hand out towards Sam. “Keep an eye out, alright?”

“Oh, c’mon. Why am I always on watch?”

“’cause I told you to.” And he likes Sam to stay in a space-time dimension he’s familiar with. He waves a vague hand. “I dunno how long that grenade thing lasts.”

“Bullshit,” Sam mutters, but he pulls another canvas roll free.

On the outside, it can’t be more than a fifty square foot office. On the inside, it’s a 200-square-foot corner view of – damn, Manhattan? The walls are floor-to-ceiling glass, maximizing a million-dollar panorama of the Chrysler building and its 70-story pals.

Dean whistles. “Okay. He’s got some taste.”

Castiel is standing behind a steel and glass monster of a desk, sifting through a filing cabinet with rapid ticks of his fingers.

Dean pulls out one of his own canvas rolls – his own paint job, too, and his palm is itching something awful under the gauze – and steps towards the window. For not-Earth, there’s some realistic NYC traffic crawling a good fifty stories below.

“Here,” Castiel says behind him, dragging a folder free. Dean backs away from the window, filled with the sudden uneasy idea of fifty floors ceasing to be under his feet.

“He’ll be reporting to Chicago in two days,” Castiel mutters.

“Chicago? Woah, wait. Chicago’s a shithole these days. We don’t even send hunters there anymore.”

“Yes. There’s an instability forming between Hell and Earth, the Horde is hoping to capitalize on it.” Castiel slaps the folder closed and slides it back into the filing cabinet. He starts carding through deeper into the cabinet. “The Seraphim will be moving in to contain it. Sabachiel serves under them as a courier. It will be relatively safe.”

“Relatively—?” Dean stops, and gives a low whistle. With an imperceptible twitch of the air there’s a newcomer: a man standing by the desk, one hand pressed casually against the glass, the other tucked into his fancy business suit pocket. He’s got the balding pattern and paunch of a middling executive, and the sneer to match.

Cas turns sharply, and goes rigid, back straightening into that of a soldier at attention. “Zachariah,” he greets stiffly.

“Castiel,” the man drawls casually, and his voice has the perfect nasal dickishness to match his vessel. “Reporting to duty at last.” Zachariah cants his head, inspecting the air behind Cas with curiosity. Castiel’s shoulders rise another self-conscious inch. “Though I can see what took you so long.”

Dean rips the gauze off his hand as he sidles towards the door. Cas was right about one thing; the angels don’t give two shits about humans. Bossman doesn’t even notice as he rolls the sigil out and digs his nails into the cut on his palm, getting the blood flowing enough to get his hand covered.

“Well,” Zachariah says, and claps his hands together. “I’m glad you had the foresight to come straight to me. I’d be happy to escort you directly to the Council, clear this whole mess up.”

“My business here isn’t done,” Cas says.

That throws Zachariah off. His tone sharpens. “Your ‘business’ is to follow orders, Castiel. Something you’ve never been particularly gifted with.”

“No,” Castiel agrees quietly. “I’ll report to Heaven when I’m finished.” Then he’s walking away, heading towards Dean and the door.

Zachariah’s expression stills to a condescending surprise as he takes in the sigil under Dean’s hand. He sneers towards Cas. “Teaching the monkeys new tricks, as well. I’ll have to make note of that in the report.”

Cas just keeps walking.

“Stop,” Zachariah demands, and Cas does. There’s a cold resentment on his face when he’s looking towards Dean; but his expression is wiped clean when he turns back towards Zachariah. “Rumor is that you’ve had quite the obsession with these disappearances.” He clicks the filing cabinet door closed with a casual hand, strides around the edge of the desk. “Rumor is you’re piecing together a grand little conspiracy theory, and my name is somewhere on your list. What you think you have is the proof you need to claim I’ve cut some deal with the Horde.”

Castiel says nothing.

“What you have, from what I’m told, is circumstantial evidence that someone of my _rank_ may be involved.”

Castiel stiffens. Zachariah smiles. “I’ve already initiated an investigation. That pandering fool Sandalphon tried to go above my head, but too little, too late, and even if Michael _did_ reassign the case I will make sure the Council ruins you and any member of your pathetic garrison that corroborated. I may not be the one who will bring you to justice but I am going to enjoy every minute of seeing you and your brothers stripped before the entire Host. So do tell me, what evidence do you think you have against me?”

Cas crosses the room in three broad steps, slams a forearm into Zachariah’s chest and raises a fist high.

“Please,” Zachariah says, teeth bared in a shark’s smile. “Assault your superior. I’ll be sure to add it to the list of transgressions.”

“You have nothing on me. You have _nothing_ on the garrison,” Castiel snarls.

“You’re 73 hours AWOL. I have everything I need.”

“I can drag _your soldier_ before the Council and provide irrevocable proof that he endangered a captain of good standing--”

“ _Good_ standing,” Zachariah parrots, and laughs. “You’re nothing, Castiel. A no-name with a middling record. Your entire garrison. I tried, I really did, tried to turn you idiots into something worthwhile--”

“You’ve always mistaken incompetence for leadership,” Castiel snarls. He shoves away hard.

Zachariah rocks back onto the desk in a controlled motion, then seizes Cas by the back of the neck, fingers digging in deep. “I can drag you to Heaven _as I please_ \--“

Dean whistles, pushing bloody fingers a few inches closer to the sigil. “Wouldn’t do that, kiddo.”

Zachariah looks Dean over with disgust before releasing his hold. He busies his hands with straightening his lapels primly. “An investigation, Castiel. You know what that means; you’re cut off. Something as small as you – in six months, there isn’t going to be a shred of grace left in you. So go on, get your proof. Make a fool of yourself before the Council. Or skip the formality and just sink into that rat’s nest of humanity you’re so fond of. You’ll be one soon enough.”

Castiel’s fury is a sharp static thing on the air as he shoves through the door. Dean covers him, hand still hovering over the sigil and watching Zachariah with a testing smirk.

With Cas through, Dean nudges the door closed with a boot heel, and drops his hand onto the sigil.

Zachariah shoves away from his desk, face twisting up into rage. He’s opening his mouth when the sigil washes him out, scattering him to the four winds.

The office stands bright and empty.

He pushes back into the musty dim of the warehouse to find Sam shouldering his backpack and Cas scowling at him. “That wasn’t necessary.”

“Aw, Cas, c’mon. You should’ve seen the look on his face.”

♤ ♤ ♤

LA TUNA CANYON, CA  
 _2006-09-02 03:42 PM_

“I’m just saying, _someone_ had to have told him, and you’re saying that kid was the only one who—“

“It wasn’t Nanael,” Castiel snaps.

Dean rolls his shoulders in a shrug. It’s a gesture Castiel’s coming to despise, because it rarely means he’s actually acceding to the point. “Alright, alright. Sam, how far we got?”

Sam consults the map spread across his lap. “’nother four, five miles and we should be hitting the inter—”

He’s cut short by a sharp lurch in the Impala’s motion. Dean has buried the brake pedal to the floor, his eyes set on the road ahead. Where the asphalt follows the smooth line of a curve, the earth of the uphill slope is giving a disorienting sideways lurch into the roadway. A vehicle in the oncoming lane swerves wide and hits a guardrail hard before getting sideswept by a wash of dun-colored boulders, which punch hard into the car’s exterior.

Dean releases the brake pedal and buries it again. The Impala gives a sharp fishtail, but he controls the sideways skid through to its conclusion: the crunch of the bumper against the rocks edging the landslide. The last of the landslide falls as pebbles that come plinking down on the black of the hood, but everything else lies still.

Sam pulls off his seatbelt, eyes on the civilian car.

“Wait—“ Castiel holds a staying hand against his shoulder.

The metal of the Impala’s roof indents with a loud thock. A woman’s high heel – cherry red - steps down onto the hood.

“Sytry,” Castiel says.

Sam’s already pulling his Beretta free. “You always on a first name basis with these things?”

Castiel watches her with cold distaste as she casually steps from hood to boulder to asphalt. “You’ve met this one before.” He shoves out of the car with the weight of his sword in hand.

Sytry slaps a hand on the roof of the Impala and drops her head down to the driver’s side window. “Hello, boys.” Castiel drops the door closed behind him. Sam balances his pistol in steady hands on the black shine of the roof.

“Are we playing with swords again today?” Sytry asks.

Dean rises last out of the car, his movements awkwardly mindful of the blade of a sickle resting against the curvature of his throat.

Castiel rests the point of his own blade against the pulse of her jugular. “We _are,_ ” she coos. Sytry tucks Dean against her chest. She smiles widely at Sam; he diverts the gun’s muzzle away from Dean with a tight expression. “See, this is much more fun with everyone on the same page.”

Dean slams his head back hard as Castiel reverses the sword in his grip and seizes her arm, dragging the sickle down and away. Dean drops to the ground; Sam gets a shot off in the brief moment Sytry is left exposed, but the bullet only traces a line along the edge of her skull, leaving red and the flash of white bone in its wake. She shoves a hand forward, propelling Sam into the rock of the landslide.

Dean moves to draw his own weapon; Sytry knees him hard in the face, rocking him back into the edge of the seat.

Castiel drops his right hand’s hold, driving his sword under her sickle and up, toward her chest. She breaks the weakened grip and drives the sickle down, but only succeeds in catching the cloth of his sleeve before the metal of the blades meet and twist aside with a shower of thin sparks.

Sytry grins, and the madness of Hell shines in the feral edge of her teeth. She draws a second sickle and ticks feverish eyes from Dean to Castiel. “I just can’t decide which of you to kill first.”

Dean smiles. There’s another brand of insanity in this human, Castiel thinks. Drawing a knife, he says, “Go on and give it a try, bitch.”

At their backs, Sam edges down the landslide onto the Impala’s hood. The black smoke rising thick from the passenger car pinned against the guardrail is what has his attention.

He keeps his attention on the fight as he backs towards the guardrail and hops over onto the loose scree sloping down towards the valley floor. The passenger door is jammed into the guardrail, the driver’s side penned in with rocks and dirt. Sam shatters the passenger-side window with the stock of his pistol, offering the struggling woman inside a hand. “Can you get the seatbelt?” She fumbles for it with shaking hands, catches the clasp and tears it free. “Good. You’re alright, just gimme your hand—“

Eyes flashing black in the California sun, she buries her fingernails deep in the flesh of his wrist and pulls. His head meets the doorframe hard, bringing the bright lights and clarion bells of an impending concussion before she’s shoving across the car and pushing at his chest.

For a lurching moment he’s falling; but he lands hard on the slope and rolls, feeling the woman’s fingers dig at his neck. She gets torn free, and tumbles a few yards further down the slope. He struggles back to the road, grabbing at the guard rail to get up and over while she scrambles in the scree behind him. The head blow is catching up fast; his toe catches on the rail, sending him into a drunken stumble to the pavement that ends in a sprawl. He drags a knife free of his boot, turning blindly to face her.

Dean is the one to catch her, burying a knife in her gut. The woman lights through and through with the sparks of something chaotic, writhing. Then she goes dark.

Dean wrenches the knife free. It’s partially Dean’s invention, partially Castiel’s; cold iron inscribed with an intricate design of Enochian sigils. There'd been a lot more to it than that, a specific sacrifice and a blend of six dozen herbs over some kind of burning holy oil, and Cas had had to do something weird with the metal - but hey, shit, it'd worked.

The host was already dead. She goes limp.

“Shit,” Dean’s echoing. “Actually works.”

“Huh.” Sam shoves the corpse off, rolls his head back in time to see Castiel ducking a scythe’s blade to headbutt Sytry square in the face. “D’you teach him that?”

Dean grins like a proud parent. “Hell yeah I did.”

Sam holds up a hand towards the knife. “Can I see that thing?”

The blow to the face does little to stun Sytry; she ensnares Castiel in a vicious embrace. In the fight to extract himself, she drags a sickle across his shoulder, but only carves a shallow wound. He falls back onto his heels. Sytry smiles through the rich red wash of blood pouring from her nose.

The hilt of Dean’s knife sprouts from her shoulder, buried deep by an expert throw. The inscriptions aren’t enough for one such as her; she drags the knife loose and discards it on the pavement.

With a twitch of her wrist she heaves Sam aside; he collides headlong with the Impala’s fender. “Wait your turn, boy.” Sam slumps low, stunned.

Gunfire plucks at the shoulder of her suit, cold iron bullets leaving puffs of torn cloth in their paths. She raises a hand to throw Dean aside with disinterest. He’s slow to rise.

The distraction of Sytry’s wrath between Dean and Castiel has served as a disadvantage to her; but it is a disadvantage to him, as well. In his divided attention she lunges forward, bearing a sickle deep into the flesh of his shoulder as she drives him to his back. She pins his sword hand beneath the point of a high heel. He presses hard against her wrist, keeping the sickle from sinking deeper still.

She looms above him, thick with the stench of corruption. “Three times I’ve caught you, little fish,” she breathes.

In North Platte she’d smiled from the back of the fray, as the fountain water he’d blessed splashed and hissed around the demon caught in his grip.

She’d smiled, and said: _now, now, don’t harm the vessel, boys._

Castiel grimaces through the burn of the sickle driving deeper, towards bone. “You want me alive.”

“I did, at first,” she admits. “Now? Well—the tall one, I think I’ll just gut. But you and him? I’m going to see who I can skin the slowest.”

She is no more healed than he; he can still smell the ichor leeching through her skin from the wound Dean had carved into her. He abandons his hold on her arm – the sickle biting deeper still with the lost resistance - to bury his fingers in the flesh of her back, eliciting a howl as he presses grace against the poison burn of her corrupted essence.

When the pressure of her hold slackens he shoves forward, throwing her onto her back. He drives a knee into her stomach. Closing his hand tight upon her throat, he balances the point of his shortsword between thumb and forefinger. “Why did you want me alive?”

“To take my time,” Sytry chokes. “Pry you apart.” She reaches with her uninjured hand for the sickle still buried in his shoulder; Dean is there to plant a heel on her wrist, and aims the Glock at her skull.

Castiel redoubles the sword’s pressure. “Do you take them all alive?”

“Cas,” Dean warns. Castiel ignores him, pressing the point of the sword deeper still, drawing out a welling of rich blood and small spits of burning essence. “ _Do you?_ ”

Sytry smiles with bloodied teeth. “We took her alive. Is that the question?”

“Cas, _kill her_ \--“

“ _Why?_ ”

She laughs, high and mocking, and digs her nails into the flesh of his wrist, bringing a searing burn of absolute _cold_ as she presses her tainted essence against his grace. “Oh, sweetheart, you should’ve smelled her burn.”

His grip tightens. Her essence shifts against his fingers, straining to pour out of the host’s throat, to escape.

Castiel drives the sword through cartilage, through bone. Crimson sparks through her frame, throwing bone and sinew into silhouette in a mockery of whatever grace she’d once possessed. There are no wings of ash, skeletal or otherwise, to mark her passage.

He wipes the sword clean on the fabric of the dead host’s blouse and rises slowly to his feet. His wrist throbs dully with her last touch.

“You’ve got a, uh—“ Dean plants gentle fingers against Castiel’s shoulder and pulls the sickle free. “There. Let’s get the hell out of here, huh?”

The human moves away. Castiel doesn’t immediately follow. He’s observing the empty vessel; what would have been a host, when she was a sister, one who followed the laws of God.

He’s never killed one such as her. What had been kin, once. He can taste her pollution on the back of his tongue, but still he thinks of the songs that would have been sung in Heaven, if she had died here not as this corruption, but as the angel she once was.

He removes himself from the sight slowly.

Dean is kneeling by his brother, peeling back Sam’s eyelid with a thumb; Sam flinches away, knocking a clumsy hand against his forearm. “Knock it off, jesus.”

“Up and at ‘em, sunshine. You’re concussed.”

“Coulda told you that.”

“No one likes a smartass, Sammy.” He takes hold of Sam’s upper arm and drags him to his feet with a steady grip. Levering open the back door, he guides Sam inside. “Get in the damn car. Cas?”

“Yes.”

“New job: keep Sam awake. Awake good, sleeping bad. Got it? Good. Go on.” He ushers Castiel impatiently towards the back door; Sam shuffles clumsily across the seat to allow him room. There are sirens arising in the distance, and Castiel is reminded uncomfortably of the constraints of human travel.

Still, he is confined to this plane, and these realities. The silence alone – it brings him a discomforting understanding of the madness in things such as Sytry.

♤ ♤ ♤

HOLBROOK, AZ  
 _2006-09-03 02:47 AM_

Sam stands with his toes sinking into soft mud, heels on the sharp cubes of shattered safety glass. The rich smell of burnt oil and diesel clings to the crumpled edges of black paint and raw metal laid out before him. But it’s not the Impala, buried under all those unnatural angles; it’s a monstrosity of a truck, the perfect image of his father’s philosophy on masculinity. The driver’s side is crushed in.

He doesn’t look. He never looks.

The tractor trailer rig that’d been the end of John Winchester (neatly scribbled lines on a police report: _blunt force trauma dead on arrival_ ) looms high over the tarmac of a no-name Louisiana backroad, grill rattling with the low rumble of its battered engine. The rig frame lurches and falls still as the engine cuts out. Silence settles, heavy and thick, but there’s nothing crawling out through the cab’s shattered windshield tonight. Not the old bastard of a trucker that’d fallen asleep at the wheel; not the specter of his father, still spitting half-truths and empty orders; not Jess, painted in blood and soot and sulfur and saying _Sam, I don’t understand, why--_.

There’s just the weight of the dark at his back. Whatever he dreams, there’s always that.

He never wants to look; never wants to _see_ \- but he always turns, and the dark is always there to greet him. That old familiar friend, staring back with sightless eyes. It hasn't seen him, hasn't _truly_ seen him, not yet, but the days are ticking down to hours are ticking down to minutes, and it will wait, it will keep waiting, it has waited for the span of all his lifetimes--

There’s someone beside him.

He turns about fast and buries his arm in its neck, shoving it hard into the dented grill of the truck. It’s an awkward college kid staring up at him, both hands thrown up in a sign of peace. “Hi, Sam,” he chokes. Nanael points a vague finger towards the empty black over Sam’s shoulder. “What’re you looking at?”

“Nanael.” Sam falls back. “What?” He follows the stare towards the dark. “Nothing.” He waves a hand, tries for casual, but the gesture has more aggression to it than he would like. “Whole lot of it. What’re you doing here?”

“Oh.” He tugs at the wrinkled hem of his shirt. “I was, uh—well, I was going to talk to you. D’you mind a change of scenery, or--?” He’s glancing toward the wrecked car, the caved-in door. Sam doesn’t follow his gaze, just twitches his shoulders in a small shrug.

He looks relieved. “Good.” A clap of his hands and the night brightens up to a loft apartment, decked out in fine oak and new-age furniture and a sprawling urban view.

Nanael is rummaging behind the kitchen counter. “You like it? It’s mine. Well, my host’s. Mountain Dew?”

“I’m alright.”

“Calorie free, you can splurge. This is still a dream. Yours, technically.”

“Right.” This is all going to seem a little weirder when he wakes up. He glances towards the skyline. It looks familiar. San Diego, maybe. “What do you want to talk about?”

“You’re still with my brother, yeah?”

“Yeah. We’re heading to—“ Sam stops, getting hung up on both the idea of the Hell-on-Earth that is Chicago, and the memory of Castiel’s anger back in Nevada. “I really shouldn’t tell you.”

Nanael smiles lightly, ticking his gaze towards the windows. The lighting in the room has changed, taking on a red glow. Sam follows Nanael’s stare. “Oh.”

The Sears Tower fills up the skyline, Lake Michigan spreading out beyond it. Smoke rises in slow, lazy columns from the streets.

“Sorry. It’s still your dream.” Nanael takes an awkward sip of his drink to fill the silence. “Chicago, huh?”

Sam jabs a finger at him. “Don’t you dare tell your brother I told you that. He’ll smite me.” But too little, too late; he cards his fingers through his hair, staring at the charred landscape. It’s a fantasized version. He doesn’t know if the fires have gotten that bad, yet. But he isn’t looking forward to the visit. “We’re going after the guy that beat up Cas in North Platte. Sabachiel.”

Nanael’s grinning. “That’s perfect.”

Sam gives him a distracted glance. “What?”

“It’s _perfect_. You guys get him, and I’ll talk with Barachiel, see if I can get him to take word up to–“ he dissolves into muttering and poking at his phone, seeming to forget for a few seconds that Sam’s there. When he glances back up, he blinks. “Oh, I should--” He rummages through his pockets, comes up with a small photo that he drops on the countertop. It’s a headshot of a trim, 30-something male. He’s got a face for magazine covers.

Nanael grins again, proud. “ _That’s_ the guy that’s been falsifying orders.”

Sam squints. “Zachariah?” He hadn’t seen what had gone on in the office, but this isn’t the petty, middling executive he’d expected.

“What? No, no. Calabriel. Same rank as Zachariah. Same access, everything.”

“Cas thinks it’s Zachariah.”

“Well, maybe. Could be. But—“ Nanael digs through a pile of folders that’s wandered into existence on the counter. He pulls a couple sheets free, laying them out. It looks like e-mail logs. “There were two, maybe three days Calabriel was unaccounted for, in September of last year. I missed him in my first sweep, ‘cause it never made the official reports, but with a little bit of digging through his personal communications -- voila.”

“If you’ve got the proof, why not grab this guy now?”

Nanael deflates a bit. “Well. It’s more of a hunch. It’s a good hunch, really. See, a lot of the orders, as best I can tell, they were falsified at an administrative level, someone with Zachariah’s rank or higher. That’s why we were thinking Zachariah, maybe, but then when Zachariah started an investigation on Castiel for going AWOL, Calabriel asked the case be reassigned to _him._ There was all this political crap about a conflict of interest, but it’s all highly unusual, an internal affairs case getting assigned to a different CO—“

“Alright, alright.” Sam waves a hand to stop him. “I believe you.”

“So I don’t have, y’know, evidence, per se. He’s really careful, y’know? Somebody in his rank, they don’t keep records of his movements the same way they do ours, and he’s probably got a dozen alibis lined up to cover him. But I think we can get him out in the open, with a little help.”

“From who?”

“Zachariah.”

Sam frowns. “Uh—“

“He’s a dick,” Nanael admits. “But Calabriel, he’s Zachariah’s equal. They compete, for assignments, for positions, for garrisons. If I can convince Zachariah that Calabriel’s up to something—“

“Then you can use Zachariah to pressure him.”

“Yeah. Exactly. You guys grab Sabachiel, I put pressure on Calabriel, and we’ll have him cornered.” Nanael shrugs. “People do stupid stuff when they’re cornered.”

There’s a couple awkward seconds of expectant silence, before Nanael bursts: “How is he?”

“Cas? Uh-- he’s alright.” A hole in his shoulder and morosely silent, from the hazed bits and pieces of tonight that he remembers. “Dean’s been shoving food at him this whole time, some weird attempt at indoctrinating Castiel into American culture. He likes hamburgers, turns out. And egg rolls.”

“Egg rolls,” Nanael mutters curiously, and taps something into his phone.

Oh, good. His brother’s going to get a garrison addicted to MSG.

Nanael goes quiet a second, looking Sam over. When he catches Sam’s curious stare he ducks his head. “I don’t know why you’re doing this. Helping Castiel, I mean. But—“ He shoves out a hand. Sam looks at a few seconds before realizing what it’s for. He takes it in a tentative handshake. “Thanks,” Nanael says. “I’d help him myself, but y’know—“

Sam nods along, shrugs. “Hey, I’ve been there. Brothers, right?"

Nanael gives a lopsided smile.

“What about the texts?” Sam asks. “The ones that sent Castiel to North Platte? You thought that was somebody else, somebody close.”

Nanael’s expression closes down. “I think—“

He doesn’t finish. In another place and another time, Sam is waking abruptly to a gentle pressure on his shoulder and the dim interior of an Arizona motel room. His head picks up the steady rhythm of a headache without missing a beat.

There’s a different angel leaning over him. “Shit,” Sam mutters, and shoves away from him. Then he grimaces. “Sorry.”

Cas takes the crude greeting in stride. “Your brother insists that you’re to be awake, no matter how often I inform him you’re alive.”

“Shut up, Cas,” Dean says from the other bed. There’s an infomercial muttering low on the television. Sam presses his palms into his eye sockets. “Good dreams?” Dean asks.

Sam considers. Waking with the dull pressure of a concussion headache, well, that sucks; but waking without the lingering weight of the foreign backwaters of his subconscious peering out at him, that, he’ll take. “Better.”

 

 

 


	5. Part V

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Chicago. Empty doorways. A dead vessel. Something big. Just a man. Big brother.

  


_This was not war as adventure, nor war for a solemn cause, it was war at its purest, a mindless mass rage severed from any cause, ideal, or moral principle. It was as if God had decreed this characterless entanglement of brainless forces as his answer to the human presumption._  
—E.L. Doctorow, _The March_

  


 

 

CHICAGO, IL  
 _2006-09-04 06:03 PM_

There are dogs watching them from empty doorways.

It’s that kind of neighborhood: burned-out houses and gaping windows, glass hanging like jagged teeth from the fire-scarred frames. The problem is the ash and soot is fresh. Some of the dogs, Dean sees, are still wearing collars. But they all pelt off into the dark as soon as any of them look their way. They’ve learned to bug off. Dean thinks it’s a lesson they could use. Because this town? This town is a bad, _bad_ idea.

The first gates might have opened in Palo Alto, Tulsa, Portland - but if the gate hasn’t popped in Chicago yet, all the signs are pointing towards ‘the end is nigh’. Bobby stopped sending anyone this way as far back as June. Too many hunters dying. Good ones.

Smoke curls towards the afternoon sky, and there aren’t even any sirens. EMS isn’t a thing. Chicago is the newest third-world country.

Cas calls it an ‘instability’, but these towns are as close to Hell on earth as Dean’s ever seen.

Sam is on point, following the John Winchester Bible of urban travel – moving in military precision, hand within easy reach of the gun on his belt – but Cas is just strolling right along, all purpose and long strides. He’s got good reason: they’ve hit two demons so far, and Cas has put them down with ease. The first was a woman who’d given them a ‘come hither’ wag from the dark of a crumbling doorway. But as they moved to pass her by, her eyes had inked black; Cas had turned, pressed a hand to her mouth hard enough to bleach his knuckles white, and worked whatever kind of voodoo magic he’s got, because she’d burned out like a Roman candle. Seems lesser demons are a little more on Cas’s level than things like that Sytry bitch.

The host didn’t survive. Her eyes were bloodied craters.

He’s picking up these kinds of tricks, Dean’s noticed; or maybe just recovering them, as his angelic batteries recharge from the North Platte nuclear blast. After sixteen stitches and a day and a half the hole in his shoulder already looks three months’ healed, and he’s started to static up the Impala’s radio something awful.

The second demon was much the same; a guy in homeless drag who’d jerked up as they passed, eyes flooding dark like some kind of involuntary twitch. Dean’s beginning to think it’s Cas, dragging the demon out of them like some kind of gag reflex. Cas dusted him, too, barely even broke stride doing it. Since Sytry – since Zachariah – he’s a man on a mission.

The only stop they’ve made was a twenty-minute detour into an alleyway to wait out the passage of some of Cas’s not-so-good angel buddies, sitting between a dumpster full of roaches and a couple bags of what smelled like either six-day-old Chinese food or a whole lot of corpses. Given the area, Dean would call either. They’ve already seen a few hands, feet, bones poking out from under the trash and debris.

As he was hunkered down, shoulder-to-shoulder with Sam, he watched a rat the size of a house cat squirm its way under the weight of a trash bag bursting with rot and tries not to think about what a feast they’re getting, all these humans ripe for the picking. All these street girls and homeless guys with garbage bag shoes, raw meat eye sockets turned up towards the sun.

They had a system: isolate the demon, exorcise it, save the host. If you’re outnumbered, and only if you’re outnumbered, then come the bullets and the knives - make the host too uncomfortable to occupy. Winchester law held that _Above all, keep your own ass alive_. But when you’ve got a guy with holy wrath in the palm of his hand, hell—it’s too easy. Even the knife tucked into Dean’s belt can’t kill demons without a fatal blow to the host.

But isn’t he gonna feel like shit the first time the host outlives the demon, and dies screaming in his hands.

The fucking choices you make. He thinks of Sam in a no-name Nevada diner, hands folded on sticky formica. Cas had asked why Sam left for Stanford, before it all; why he’d only chosen hunting second, when the Palo Alto fires came sweeping ‘round his doorstep. Sam had folded his hands on the tabletop and said, _You spend enough time staring down those types of—people, and you start to see parts of them in yourself. You start to make decisions that really blur the lines._ Then he’d hesitated, eyes on everything but Dean. _I didn’t want to make those kinds of decisions anymore._

The choices you make.

At the end of their break Cas stands up abruptly, scopes the street from the end of the alleyway, and walks briskly on. Dean and Sam check their safeties and follow.

The next demon, a scrawny kid, gets enough of a heads up to drop back a step and try to bolt; Cas grabs him by the collar and slams him into the pavement. The demon’s already trying to smoke out before Cas clamps a hand over his mouth.

Dean grabs his arm. “ _Wait._ Wait.”

Cas turns an impatient look his way.

“Can you do that without—“ he waves a hand towards his eyes.

“Better to kill the demon,” Cas answers. The edge to his voice is sharp and cold.

“He’s wearing a human,” Dean says; he keeps his tone steady, calm. “Me and Sam, we’re in this for the humans. C’mon, let’s just exorcise him.”

Whatever involuntary effect Cas has on demons, Chicago seems to have its own effect on him. In his vague descriptions, the lead-up to a Hell gate is a temporary collapse between the two planes: Hell leeching up, however briefly, for a little Earthside vacation. Dean can still remember the sound of Cas sizzling where Sytry had dug her nails into him. It’s gotta be unpleasant, walking around in a place that burns against his very nature.

There’s a moment of hesitation where Cas bears down all the harder, watching the demon writhe under him with a look of disgust. Then he lets up, shifts his grip to a chokehold.

The demon spills up over the kid’s lips, flowing down his face in silky black streams before sinking slowly into the concrete in a puddle edged in hellfire. Going, going, gone.

Cas gets back to his feet, attention already ticking back towards the road ahead. “It’ll be back,” he mutters. “Judging by the state of this city, in a matter of hours.”

Dean gives him a slap on the shoulder. “You’re a good man, Cas.” The irony is intended. Cas doesn’t look impressed.

Turns out, the host was already dead anyway.

They follow a one-lane road clogged with burned-out cars for six, seven blocks before Cas comes to an abrupt stop, turning his head back the way they’ve come.

Abruptly, he drags Dean by the collar through the shattered door of an empty storefront. Sam ducks in behind them.

Cas is in a kneel, watching a patch of space two stories up; as Dean follows the stare, he sees something like a heat shimmer, distorting the brickwork in a loose shape that resolves, slowly, to the shambling walk of something impossibly massive. It comes to a stop, lifts the silhouette of an ugly head like a dog testing the air.

They all hold very, very still.

After a pause, it starts to ramble ponderously on.

In the stillness afterwards, Dean asks, “The fuck was that?”

“Something big,” Cas answers. Dean scoffs. “No shit.”

“It’s testing the veil,” Cas says. “Best not to give it a reason to come through.”

“Man. I have got to bag me one of those.” Dean elbows Sam. “What’s tastier to that thing, Cas? Him or you?”

He gets disapproving glares from them both.

“We’re very close,” Cas announces.

Sam watches as Cas’s attention flickers from the window towards the wall of broken shelves. “How’re you tracking this guy, anyway?”

“Through his flight,” Cas answers, turning his ADD attention span towards the back of the store. “It requires entering and exiting on certain planes. It’s traceable, within some degree of accuracy, if you know what frequency to listen for.”

Dean can see ten or twelve questions get backed up in Sam’s head at that, but Cas is moving on towards the backroom before he can ask them. The little trooper just holds them all in, god bless him. It looks uncomfortable.

Sam moves to follow Cas, and Dean takes up the rear. He’s still sneaking glances out the storefront, and trying to figure out how he’d take down a Hellbeast the size of a house, and god damn would that be _awesome_.

“No way,” Sam whispers.

“What?”

“No way,” Sam continues confidently, “you could go ten seconds with that thing. It’d crush you like an ant.”

“Not if I had a _tank._ ”

“Where the hell are you going to get a tank? Army surplus store?”

“No,” Dean scoffs, even if that’d been the first answer to come to mind. He reconsiders. “Steal one, I guess.”

Cas tears through the chain securing the back door with a casual hand and presses it open. Sam takes point into the alleyway, signals the all-clear. Cas moves past him at an impatient pace. “That close, huh?”

Cas holds up a hand to silence him, and walks on.

After a few steps, he breaks into a run.

There’s a burst of light – angelic flashbang – that reflects off the brickwork at the end of the narrow alley. Dean throws up an arm instinctively as a transformer overhead goes with a burst of sparks, raining down onto the cracked pavement.

Cas is hissing, “No, _no_ ,” and then they’re bursting onto an open street.

Dean and Sam take flanking positions, guns up and adrenaline singing; but the street’s empty, a two-block affair hemmed in by rundown tenant housing. Empty except for the man lying in the street, legs tangled and arms sprawled. Sightless eyes are turned up towards the cloudless sky.

“Dean—“ Sam starts.

“Yeah, I see ‘em.”

Charcoal wings, spread wide across the pavement. It gets Dean thinking of the shadows burnt into the concrete after Hiroshima.

Cas kneels by the body, curls a fist in the fabric of his lapel. There’s blood pooling just under his sternum, a stab wound. Dean hazards a guess: “Sabachiel?”

Cas doesn’t answer, but his motions are answer enough. He drops back on his heels, dragging a hand slowly through his hair. It’s a human gesture. A hopeless one. This was his last lead.

“You’ve still got evidence, right? Guy disappears a few days, turns traitor, busts your wing, and right when you’re about to bust him he shows up conveniently dead.”

“It’s circumstantial. This—“ Castiel begins, and stops, falling into a grim silence.

“We’ll find more,” Sam says.

“They’re sloppy,” Dean adds. “You found the orders, you found this guy. You’re close, they _know_ you’re close. Hell, we already knifed their Queen Bitch.”

Castiel rises slowly to his feet. “I’ve dragged you through enough.”

Dean grins. “Ah, shit. We’re invested, now. This is the most fun we’ve had in years.”

Cas gives them a measuring stare. It’d be insulting, if it didn’t end in a small smile – which on the subtle scale of Cas emotions, is pretty close to ecstasy.

The smile’s just as soon slipping off. Cas turns on his heel, peering into the growing shadows of the alley across the street. Dean raises the Glock. “What’re you seeing?”

“Something big,” Cas says.

The shadows shift, rolling like the heave of something’s massive shoulders. Something getting a lot more solid than some heat shimmer against brickwork. Sam breathes a sigh. “Great.”

Cas glances back at them and says, “ _Run_.”

♤ ♤ ♤

Yeah, they run. They run like there’s a goddamn thing the size of a Chrysler building thundering after them, because well, there is.

It seems to be getting more corporeal as they go; where it’d first charged whole hog down the narrow alleyways Dean’s been leading them down, now the buildings groan and shake as it presses through after them, like reality is starting to lay down constraints. Pretty soon they duck down an alleyway and the thing can’t follow. It hits the building face with a force that crumples brick and shatters windows, howling at their backs in a sound like metal scraping on glass.

They keep running.

Dean’s got them on a roundabout route to get them back to the car, which – after Cas’s long, blind pursuit – is a good twenty blocks southeast of where they’d started this death sprint. The late summer heat has Sam’s shirt plastered to him by the sixth block, and he’s swiping a stream of sweat out of his eyes by the eighth.

But by the ninth, the air’s stopped shivering with that thing’s unseen howls. By the tenth, they’re slowing to a jog, and a walk. They stop in the sticky shade of a derelict warehouse to catch a few breaths. Dean scopes out the area around the corner – an empty lot, piled with trashbags – and signals the move forward.

The loud snap of a single gunshot ricochets off the brick and concrete.

Time snags on that sound, that moment: the pull of Dean’s hand at his shoulder, dragging him back; the feel of Dean’s shirt under Sam’s fingers, the weight of his own gun in his hand; and the man crouching in the shadow of a dumpster, slouch-shouldered and dishevelled, eyes wide and clear over the pistol held in his shaking hands.

He lowers the gun, turns on a fraying sneaker and runs.

There’s another stunned second where Sam’s taking that quick, adrenaline-sharpened self-inventory of _no, not hit_ \- then he’s pushing away from Dean and running. Dean and Cas are twin footfalls at his back, but Sam’s got the extra leg to close the distance.

Sam grabs a fistful of the man’s shirt, jams a foot into the back of his knee and follows him down to the pavement with his own weight. The man sprawls inexpertly - gun hand flung out, letting the pistol clunk hard against the concrete. Sam reaches forward to grab it, his own gun a heavy reminder on the back of the man’s neck.

“Christo,” Sam spits. The man’s eyes roll with fear, but they stay white, and he isn’t surprised. Just a spooked civilian shooting at shadows.

The man breathes in rasps. Sam feels a small turn of disgust.

Sam digs the muzzle down into vertebrae and then lets up, getting back to his feet. The man stays where he is a second - skinned palms hovering uncertainly over the concrete - then slowly rises, eyes on the pistols in Sam’s hands. Sam works the clip free and pockets it, takes the round out of the chamber, and hands the emptied pistol back to him. “Get to where you need to go and stay there,” he snaps. “Don’t let me see you again.”

The guy accepts the pistol with shaking hands. He takes off at a lopsided run, doesn’t even look back. “Idiot,” Sam spits under his breath.

The adrenaline rush is peeling back, leaving raw nerves and a dry throat behind. He checks the safety on his own gun and glances back towards Dean. He’s still tracking the guy’s shambling attempt at a 500 meter record with the barrel of his own gun.

Once the man rounds the corner, Dean loosens up and waves his Glock. “Couple days’ wait and anybody can have one.” He gives a sideways grin, and his teeth shine red.

Cold blooms in Sam’s stomach.

Cas - the silent observer - is already pressing a cautious hand to Dean’s back. “Dean--”

Dean takes an absent swipe at his mouth, then plucks at his shirt to look at the neat circle of blood blooming between his ribs. “Ah, shit-- it’s not that bad.”

“Yeah?” Sam says, casual, numb, and pulls at his shirt to get a better look. The exit wound is larger, the pooling blood brighter, a rich crimson. It’s in the right territory for heart, lung. Sam pulls off his overshirt, tears it in two. Cas holds against the front and Sam bears the other half into the growing flood of (bright) red on Dean’s back. “Damn, that burns,” Dean’s saying through a clenched-teeth grin, and Sam’s saying – tone flat - “Yeah, not that bad.” They work the belt off Cas’s trenchcoat around both, cinch it tight.

Sam reaches to get an arm under his shoulders. Dean shoves him off. “Get the hell off me, I’m fine. Go on, take point. Let’s get out of here. This town sucks.”

It’s the same thing on any hunt. You just focus on the exit strategy; you just move until you’re out. The city is a silent, looming thing around them, and they just have to move.

One block; five blocks more.

Two blocks. Four blocks more.

Three.

Two.

“Fuck,” Dean says between wet, wheezing gasps. Castiel says, “Sam.”

It’s a side street, too open. There’s a corrugated roll-top door to the right, half up. Sam ducks under. It’s an abandoned warehouse, peeled paint and sprung rebar hanging in mildewed curtains from a ruined ceiling. The sun filters in streams through shattered windows onto the broken pallets and metal drums scattered across the floor.

He ducks his head back out. “Here.”

Cas helps Dean through the door. Dean’s fingers are white-knuckled in the tan of Cas’s coat.

Sam drags the door closed behind them with a screech of abused metal and a fine shower of rust.

He brushes Cas aside and pulls with numb fingers at the belt, working it loose, tugging at the wet heavy _red_ compress to see the spill of blood rising up to meet his fingers. He drives the heel of his hand into the flow, bears his other palm into Dean’s shoulder. “We’re not far, alright? Two blocks, man, I promise, and it’s not--” There’s warm blood flowing between his fingers, down his wrist, bright red, _arterial_ , but he says, “It’s not that bad.” Doesn’t matter. Dean’s not really tracking him, anymore, lost in the fight for air.

Dean’s breaths are shallow and rasping and the cool, calm certainty that he’s not going to get back up threads slowly through Sam’s mind.

He shoves up, moves towards Cas, who’s standing tall and silent and still among the trash-strewn floor. “Cas, there’s gotta be something, anything--”

“I can’t heal him,” Cas is saying in that damnably matter-of-fact voice. “Healing requires mandate, my mandate was rescinded.”

“Then fucking-- _unrescind_ it! He needs a hospital _now_ , Cas--”

Cas is just silent.

Sam wraps bloodied hands in the lapels of his trenchcoat and shoves him back a step, but whatever words there are are caught up in the panic and disbelief crushing his own throat. The only thing he can rasp is, “ _Please._ ”

_if there’s anything you stand for, god, please, anything_

Cas just stares back. A small guy in an ill-fitted trenchcoat. Sam’s hands leave smears of red across the fabric.

He drops back next to Dean, presses his hand into the well of bright arterial red and tries to get his head back and aside, clear the airway a little, tries to hear for the whistle of breath under the desperate choking gasps and someone’s muttering a nonsense mantra of _it’s okay it’s okay you’ll be okay_ and Dean’s got a hand gripped tight around his wrist that’s slackening, slackening.

Castiel stares. His mouth moves in a small, unspoken prayer.

A pair of Converse sneakers move hesitantly in on the edge of Sam’s vision. They belong to a shaggy-haired college kid, who drops into a kneel and presses a gentle hand against Sam’s wrist. Sam doesn’t – won’t – let go of the fabric clenched in his fist, but Nanael carefully moves his hand aside, just enough to press too-clean fingers against his bloody wreck of a brother.

Dean breathes in a ragged gasp of air. He writhes aside and chokes it up as black blood, coughing and hacking across the pavement. Sam watches numbly as Nanael gives him a few swats on the back. One, two, and the wet patch of blood covering Dean’s back is gone. Three and so is the neat little hole in the fabric.

Dean wheezes one last cough into the pavement and slowly rolls back onto his elbows. He gives Nanael a long stare. “Thanks. I guess.”

Nanael smiles lopsidedly. “Sure.”

Castiel watches in silence as Sam drags Dean – whole - upright.

He drops a hand on Nanael’s shoulder. It’s thanks enough before he bears his thumb down, propelling Nanael backwards in a gentle shove. “Nanael—go.”

Nanael ducks behind his hair. “Yeah.” He doesn’t; he starts rummaging through his pockets, comes up with his phone. “But listen, I—“

“Nanael--” Castiel begins, impatient.

“Wait, _listen_ , about North Platte, I know who it was, I know who--”

Another voice interrupts: “Found you at last.”

His first motion is to push Nanael behind him, the weight of his shortsword falling against his fingertips within his sleeve; his second, upon recognizing the grace before him, is to drop back in an open-shouldered surprise. “Uriel.”

Uriel spreads open hands. “Brother. This is where you’ve been hiding?”

But Nanael is crowding close behind him and murmuring a single word: “Him.” They exchange one sidelong glance. Nanael’s eyes are wide, and certain. He digs a shaking hand into Castiel’s shoulder and moves past, towards the Winchesters. Uriel follows Nanael’s path with a cool stare and raises surprised eyebrows. “I’d heard the rumors, but really - hiding among the humans?”

“Dean, nice to meet you,” Dean drawls. Uriel ignores him, and continues: “Nanael sneaking his way out of a war zone, you’re fortunate I’m the only one who noticed. There’s many eyes on the garrison because of you, Castiel. Are you finished with this foolishness?”

“Not yet.”

Uriel inclines his head. “So you have proof, then?”

“I will.”

Someone with access to Nanael’s phone had sent the message. Had sent him to Sabachiel, and Sytry.

Disbelief pools heavy in his stomach.

“Enough of this, little brother,” Uriel says. “Our sister was a loss to us all, but this is insane. Nanael told me of all your - theories. Zachariah? At best he will have you punished, a few centuries in the cistern. At worst you will be court-martialed, tried for treason.”

Uriel is forcing an expression of uncharacteristic sympathy, and Castiel is testing the edge of the shortsword resting in his sleeve.

“Zachariah,” Castiel repeats. “Zachariah is short-minded, and petty. He hates the garrison. But he would never do something that wasn’t to his political benefit. Losses don’t carry well on the reports.”

“So who will you point the blame at next, brother? The seraphim? The archangels?”

“Someone that knew the garrison. Knew to use Nanael to send me to North Platte. Knew to misdirect me towards Zachariah. To set Sytry waiting there.” Uriel says nothing. Castiel inclines his head. “How many times have you been demoted, Uriel? For disobedience, and pride. You should be second only to Sandalphon, and yet I outrank you.”

His good humor fades. “Castiel, this has gone on long enough. Come home, let us clear your name.”

“So you can give the seraphim their traitor?”

Silence hangs heavy between them. At last, Uriel breaks into a small smile. “Not if you see reason. And I think you’re beginning to. You could be of great benefit to us, Castiel.” Uriel looks past Castiel, towards the Winchesters - towards Nanael. “The both of you.”

Certainty washes through him, cold and sharp. “You killed Israfiel.”

“We asked her the same question I’ll ask you, Castiel. Will you join us?”

“You _betrayed_ her. Dozens of us, for _what_?”

“I saved them from a false Mandate,” Uriel says. There’s no madness to him, not like Sytry; only unerring calm. A madness in its own right.

“Our Father’s mandate,” Castiel intones. “The one we _all_ serve.”

Uriel barks a sharp laugh. “Our _Father,_ ” he drawls with disgust. “Our Father, who told us to bow to this _filth_ \--” A sharp gesture towards the Winchesters. “You serve an empty throne, and the whim of the corrupt. Vain sycophants and mindless bureaucracy. I’m offering you _freedom_ , Castiel. Freedom from Michael’s blind subservience to an absurd game.”

“Instead I can serve Lucifer’s greed, and pride, and vanity,” Castiel spits.

“You think so little of him? Our _brother_? He wants this world to be the paradise it once was, before the plague of mankind. Restored to Father’s true image.”

Castiel looks away. “What did Israfiel say?”

Uriel smiles wanly. “Give me an answer, Castiel.”

It’s an answer that comes rapid and sure. “No.”

Uriel smiles towards the floor. The wan afternoon light flashes brightly on the edge of his sword.

He moves with brutal strength, but little speed. It’s enough. Castiel is too slow to understand this, to understand _Uriel_ moving against him. His first blow slams Castiel into the concrete of a pillar and through. He lands amongst twisted rebar and sifting dust, and clarity settles on him as a cold rage.

Israfiel; and so many others. And Nanael - Nanael now _here_ , endangered by his own failures--

He grips his own shortsword tight, pulls an arm close to his torso in a mimicry of injury and speaks in short breaths: “Uriel, don’t do this.” Uriel doesn’t falter, closing the distance in heavy steps. Castiel drops his shoulder and shoves up, catching him in the ribcage, throwing him off-step. He has to rise to his toes to wrap his fingers in Uriel’s collar and press the shortsword forward in a quick stab.

It’s a miss. Uriel pulls free, and Castiel’s senses bleach to white noise with the backhanded collision of the hilt of Uriel’s shortsword with the side of his skull.

The chaos resolves to Uriel on the floor: Nanael is on top of him, grappling for the sword. Uriel throws him free with ease, slamming him to the floor. Castiel lunges towards them, but Uriel meets his advance and overpowers him, throwing him flat in the dust.

Uriel reaches up and grips a piece of rusted rebar hanging from the ceiling, wrenching it free. When Nanael advances again, he puts him down with a lazy swing, and buries the rebar in his shoulder. Nanael grunts in discomfort.

Castiel lunges again. Uriel is quicker, and backhands him hard; wrapping a fist in his collar he follows the hit with a second, and a third.

“You’ve killed him, you know,” Uriel says casually, in the hazed space between blows. “Shouldn’tve brought him into this. But he’s always been your shadow, hasn’t he?”

“Your _brother_ ,” Castiel spits, even as fear curls tightly in his gut.

Uriel smiles thinly, looking over the red shine painting his knuckles. “Brothers stand _together_ , Castiel. You – you’re nothing.”

He throws Castiel to the ground, and plants a heel against the back of his neck.

“Uriel,” Castiel exhales. Blood stains the dust below him.

It gives the Winchesters a clear line of sight. Gunfire rings out in unison: twinned holes bursting from the cloth of Uriel’s suit, striking shoulder, lung, neck. Uriel ignores them, until a bullet dislodges skull in a spray of blood and bone.

Uriel raises a hand. The gunfire ceases as the Winchesters collide hard with the concrete of the walls.

He’s stalking towards them when Castiel regains his feet, catching Uriel in a low tackle beneath the ribs. They hit the ground and fall into a roll that ends in a jarring collision with the metal of a support beam. Uriel draws his sword wide, and finds flesh.

The sword cuts a long furrow between Castiel’s ribs. The blade sears through his grace, setting the air resonating. In that boundless eternity of pain Uriel is shoving him down, driving his head into the concrete.

“You think yourself so _clean_ , Castiel,” Uriel drawls, pressing a gritted toe harder into the side of his face. “You bow to the corrupt and the weak.”

Castiel gasps: “Coward.”

As Uriel raises the sword, gunfire snaps loud through the confines of the warehouse. The hand gripping the sword is obscured in a spray of blood and tissue. Tendon and bone shine white within the ruin. Dean stands with his shoulders against the wall, the gun steady in his hands.

Uriel roars, and turns upon him with sword upraised. Too many tendons are severed; the sword clatters against the concrete.

Castiel slams a foot into the back of Uriel’s knee, wrapping numb fingers into the hem of his suit jacket to ensure his fall with his own weight. He slams Uriel’s head into the concrete as he lunges past him, grappling for the discarded shortsword.

He seizes Uriel’s shoulder, throwing him to his back. His brother's hand skates down his sleeve, seizes at his forearm with brutal force. But only then – face to face - does Castiel bury the sword home.

There’s resistance as the blade forces through skin. Then it cuts smoothly between ribs and up, into lung, heart, and through. The blade grinds on the bone of vertebrae. Blood spills hot across Castiel’s fingers, spilling to the floor.

Uriel’s expression is one of surprise.

Castiel bears his hand into sternum and jerks hard to free the blade of bone and gristle.

For an eternity, Uriel writhes and chokes. For an eternity more his grace shivers apart, and at last catalyzes into a searing wash of white.

When it fades, wings of ash stretch the length of the abandoned garage.

The Winchesters are gathering themselves off the floor. Sam is holding an arm close; sprained or broken. Dean swipes blood from a laceration free of his eyes. They both take in the wings. They both look to Castiel, rising to his feet to stand tall and still.

As they watch, the shortsword slips between Castiel’s fingers and clatters against the concrete.

Nanael is pressing his hands against Castiel’s shoulders. “Brother--” But there aren’t words. Castiel is looking to him with the eyes of the lost, and the damned.

“Guy was a dick, Cas,” Dean starts.

“He was my _brother_ ,” Castiel shouts, sending the room crashing back into a startled silence. The wind through the half-open door tugs gently at the ashes scattered across the floor. Castiel continues, low and shaking: “He should’ve been brought before the Council. He should’ve been tried.”

Nanael shifts to press the heel of his palm into the blood blooming under Castiel’s arm. Blue grace shines in the shadowed folds of his trenchcoat.

Dean ducks his head low, speaking in a hush. “Sam, y’got the car?”

“Yeah, I’ll go—“ Sam stops, and drags his gun up – steadied only by one hand – to focus on the roll-top door.

With a casual grace, a man in a well-tailored suit ducks beneath the door. He brushes the rust from his shoulder, straightens his jacket, and takes in the room from behind wire-rimmed glasses. His attention tics down to Uriel, and his lips thin with displeasure.

“Who the hell are you?” Dean asks, taking an aggressive step forward, gun raised.

Sam is falling back, looking for a second exit; but there’s another man lounging in the lee of the back door, hands buried deep in a leather jacket.

Sam sights him down the barrel. He’s got six shots left in the clip, and he’ll have to make them count.

“Nanael,” Castiel says quietly. “Take them. Two blocks east. A black car.”

Sam can’t take his eyes off the mark. “Cas, wait—“

Nanael’s hand drops heavy on his shoulder, and the ground lurches beneath his feet. He’s splaying his hands across the Impala’s hood, squinting in the glare of the fading sunlight. By the time they turn Nanael is already falling back onto his heels. “Hey, _wait_ —“

There’s just empty air.

Dean scrambles for the keys.

Words are short and sharp between them – “Fuck, what are these?” “Demons?” “Smelled like—“ - as the Impala roars to life. Dean tears it out of the parking spot and into the empty street.

“C’mon, c’mon—“ The Impala hops the curb, following a narrow alleyway – mirrors scraping brick – before bursting onto the trash-strewn causeway leading to the warehouse. So fucking _close_. Dean slams on the brakes, but Sam’s already out and running before the tires come to a stop.

He leaves the roll-top to Dean, follows the alley to the back of the warehouse in a low run. There’s a side door, partially ajar. He slips in and moves rapidly up the corridor. The back rooms are empty. Whatever these things are, they seem to be working alone.

Doesn’t seem like much of a problem, for them.

The big guy looks like he picked up his fighting style in a bar. He smashes an elbow into Cas’s face, grabs a handful of tie and follows it up with a headbutt for good measure. There’s no clear shot; not without hitting the angels. Sam tracks the motions, but he can’t pull the trigger.

Uriel’s sword is still on the floor. Sam keeps the gun up and moves towards it in a rapid side-step. Dean rushes through the roll-top, but the demon fighting Nanael throws him back with a lazy hand.

Castiel’s attention is divided; when Nanael takes a particularly hard hit, he buries a forearm in the demon’s throat, holding him back long enough to grind out: “Marchosias. Please. He’s not involved.”

First name basis. Another Grigori, then. Which means swords work.

The skinny demon gets in a right hook that knocks Nanael back, and he wraps a hand around the angel’s wrist. Something goes wrong, there. There’s a flash fire of light beneath the demon’s hand, and Nanael goes abruptly limp, eyes hazed. Cas twists towards him, looking panicked.

The windowpanes shiver with a blast of angelic screech as Marchosias buries his nails in the open wound in Castiel’s side. The demon slams his skull into the tarmac, stuns him long enough to mimic the other demon’s grip, encompassing the back of his neck. Sickly red light blooms between his fingers. Castiel sags.

The air grows abruptly still, absent of that frenetic energy that’s been resonating in Sam’s bones for days.

Castiel keens low in the silence.

Marchosias drags him to his feet by the collar of his jacket. He gestures towards Nanael. “Take him.”

Castiel pulls away, throwing a blind arm back. Marchosias secures his grip, ignoring his struggles.

The demon holding Nanael gives Dean a disapproving glance. “The humans?”

Marchosias shakes his head. “Mine. Go.”

The demon gives a curt nod, and dusts off. Nanael, pale and shaking, disappears into the sulfurous cloud.

The cloud resolves to empty warehouse floor. In the silence, Marchosias tosses Castiel aside; he falls to his knees.

Dean shoves upright, free of the absent demon’s grip. “What the fuck did you do?”

Marchosias looks down on Castiel in disinterest. “Bound him.”

Castiel is curled low, forehead pressed to the dirt. But Sam can see his fingers moving in small tics beneath him. He eyes the sword, no more than three feet to his right.

“What are you going to do with them?” Sam asks.

“Curious humans, aren’t you.”

The demon’s attention ticks down towards Castiel. Sam swaps the gun to his bad hand and dives for the sword, and rises with it close by his side. It’s enough to draw Marchosias’s attention back. The thin line of his mouth upturns in distaste. “That weapon is not meant for your hands, boy.”

Sam raises it to a striking position.

“Please,” Marchosias says, all polite condescension. “Try.” Metal scrapes concrete; to the demon’s right, Dean draws Castiel’s discarded sword from the rubble, and stands at the ready.

Between them, Castiel buries his palm in the blood leaching from his side. Marchosias’s attention has just begun to tic back down when the angel shoves his bloodied hand to the floor.

The white light of an angel banishment shivers through the space, but it doesn’t have quite the same effect. Where that wavelength seemed to tear apart angels, shipping them off to god knows where – dissonant frequencies, Cas had said – Marchosias gets thrown hard into the nearest wall. A haze of shattered concrete sifts down to cover him.

Castiel falls back onto his heels, arm curled against his wounded side.

There’s enough left around the bloody handprint to make out an angel banishment sigil. “Thought you said that wouldn’t work on Gregs,” Dean says.

Sam kneels beside him, running a careful hand over the back of Castiel’s neck. There’s a symbol there, seared into the skin. He doesn’t recognize it. “It should’ve worked on you.”

“Bound,” Castiel pants. “Nothing to shift.”

Concrete skitters against the floor. With slow, measured Marchosias gathers his hands beneath him.

Castiel lunges forward in a drunken stumble. Sam grabs at his shoulder; he almost throws him down, startled by how pliant he is. “Cas—“

Cas shoves against him, eyes on the demon, tone feral. “Where did you take him?”

Marchosias presses upright and pauses, kneeling in the dirt, head canted aside to consider Castiel with a measured stare.

“ _Where?_ ” Castiel’s shout breaks on the air.

The grigori dissolves to smoke, punching through the shattered windows.

In the silence, Castiel breathes in short, rasping gasps.

“C’mon, man. Let’s go,” Sam murmurs quietly. Castiel says nothing.

Dean takes the sword from Sam, keeping an uneasy eye on the door. “Yeah, screw this town.”

Sam swings Cas’s arm over his shoulders. Cas presses heavy against him.

“Where do we go?”

Dean just shakes his head. “The hell out of here.”

 

 

 

 


	6. Part VI

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Backseat first aid. Blue Earth. One last text.

_But for the most part God had so much expectations for us and we have not turned out right. We are his chief blunder. I mean, bats are his blunder, and ticks and horseflies and leeches and moles and cottonmouths-- they are all his blunders, but the greatest of those is us._  
—E.L. Doctorow, _The March_

  


 

 

CHICAGO, IL  
 _2006-09-04 08:32 PM_

Sam rolls Castiel on his side, balanced awkwardly over him in the too-small backseat. Every bump has the back of his head hitting the roof of the car, and on Illinois backroads, there’s a hell of a lot of bumps.

It’s strange to see him like this, unconscious. For a week, he’s been the shadow in the corner of the motel room – a stiff and silent sentinel, the low hum of his grace one of the only comprehensible things in a world filling up fast with unknowns.

Now he rolls loosely with each lurch of the car.

Sam peels back the bloodied shirt and pulls the compress free. The gauze is already soaked through. “This is bleeding a lot more, now.” Sam cups his hands to either side of the wound, peering through the dark. “No more shine, though.”

Dean keeps his eyes dead ahead. “Can you suture it?”

“Yeah.” He presses fresh gauze down, braces his shoulder against the backseat as the Impala hits another patch of broken road. “Find some decent interstate.”

♤ ♤ ♤

BLUE EARTH, MN  
 _2006-09-05 02:07 AM_

The only movement at 2 am in Blue Earth, Minnesota is the town drunks spilling out the bars in unsteady steps. Dean follows County Road 16 three miles out of town to an unmarked gravel road. Pastor Jim Murphy’s house, a two-story clapboard affair, is dark and shuttered; but the door is open to the Stillwater Chapel. Light spills warm across the gravel as Dean kills the engine and stretches his legs out into the heavy weight of the Minnesota summer air.

“Boys,” Jim Murphy says cordially, a thin shadow in the tall arch of the doorway.

“Hey, Pastor. Good to see you.” Dean climbs the steps, claps him on the shoulder.

“Sight for sore eyes, Pastor,” Sam says as he drags Cas free of the backseat. Cas finds his feet with a drunk’s clumsy caution. He’s been building up a fever since the Illinois state line, and he’s a furnace against Sam’s skin as Sam pulls an arm over his shoulders.

Dean offers a brisk introduction. “Jim, this is Castiel, Castiel, Pastor Jim.” Cas gives Jim a narrow-eyed once over, but doesn’t seem to see anything of note. He sways his weight back into Sam. Dean gives an apologetic shrug. “He’s a little out of it.”

Jim takes in Castiel’s sweat shine and the loose gauze with a clinical eye. “We can make him more comfortable up at the house--”

“We thought the church might do him some good,” Dean answers. Jim raises an eyebrow, but presses the door open without comment.

They shamble slowly into the bright of the church’s whitewash walls and oak pews. “There’s blankets, pillows, first aid kits, fresh clothes.” Jim retrieves a Thermos from one of the pews. “Coffee. Might be a bit cold, now.”

“Oh, god bless you, Jim,” Dean exudes, grabbing the Thermos. “Sam?”

“Yeah, in a minute.” Sam settles Cas down in the closest pew. “You have a pen, Jim? Some paper?”

“Of course.” Jim rummages behind the pulpit, comes up with a dog-eared sheet of hymns and a pencil.

With slow, careful strokes, Sam recreates the sigil seared into the back of Castiel’s neck.

“Cas.” He grabs at Castiel’s jaw, gets hazed eyes focused on him, and then the paper. “Hey. This is the sigil, alright? The one he branded you with. Can we break it?”

He studies the sigil with furrowed brow. “I don’t--” he drifts off, shakes his head.

“Might I?” Jim takes the paper, frowns at it. “I’ll bring up what I have,” he says.

“Here.” Dean hands a blanket over to Sam and settles back against the next pew. “We can’t just burn it off?”

Sam sets to arranging the blanket around Cas’s shoulders. “If it’s a seal like Dad’s lockboxes, you’ve gotta break it in the right spot. Might even have to break it a particular way - burning, or a specific kind of knife - to avoid some kind of backlash.”

Cas is listening on some level; he gives a small nod of agreement, shuddering his way through another wash of fevered cold.

“You think Jim’s gonna have a book on angel-branding?”

“Not really, no. But what else have we got?”

“A hospital,” Dean offers reluctantly. “Guy he’s wearing will be on some missing persons lists, sure, but it’s hours, maybe days before they ID him. If he’s going septic, a field kit isn’t gonna fix it. I don’t wanna be the one explaining to some random-ass angel we killed his brother.”

“You think they won’t be watching hospitals? We can’t protect him there. We break the seal, he can heal himself.” He looks towards Dean, and asks again: “What else have we got?”

♤ ♤ ♤

Dean breathes out the humid soup Minnesotans call air, looking for the silver-lined gust he’s used to seeing in these fields, but there’s no chance of that tonight. The night air’s hot and thick, and he’s sweating his balls off under Dad’s leather jacket. The idling of the Impala’s engine is comfortable white noise at his back as he grips Castiel’s sword a little tighter under his coat, and wonders how fucking stupid he has to be to think this is a good plan.

Then he thinks of the look on Castiel’s face, taking in the emptiness where Nanael had been.

God damn, let him be right about this one thing.

He wraps his fingers tight around the sword hilt and turns his head up higher, towards the moon. “Alright. Uhm—fuck.” He doesn’t even know how to start this. Cas hadn’t really gotten into specifics on the mechanics of this prayer crap. He doesn’t know if this is a party line or what. “Sandalphon?” He’s talking to a car. And a corn field. He clears his throat and presses a hand flat on the heat of the Impala’s hood. “This is for your ears only. Rest of you bastards, fuck off. But if you can hear me, Sandalphon, then—we need your help. Your brother does. So—please.”

There’s a long silence. And hey, ain’t that a surprise. Prayer’s always had a hell of a lag time in the Winchester family. Couple generations, or so.

The rumble of the engine picks up beneath his hand, and the air vibrates with the static hum of aggravated angel. Dean pulls the sword free of his coat as he turns.

The angel that bears down on him is righteous resolve, and thunder rolls through the thickening sky with the sharp edge of his voice. “Where is he?”

♤ ♤ ♤

Sam stretches his fingers loose, grimacing at the tacky pull of drying blood. His arm is starting to ache from holding it upright. Dean’s taking his dear sweet time. How far did he go, St. Paul?

At the sound of gravel popping under tires he straightens up, gripping Uriel’s sword tighter in his free hand. His wrist is halfway to busted, but the angel doesn’t need to know that. An uneven staccato of three knocks at the door. Jim undoes the latch and pulls the door open.

For all the talk, the man that walks in isn’t what Sam had expected.

He’s dressed sharp: a pristine shirt and silk tie neatly arranged beneath a well-tailored waistcoat. Younger, late 20s at most; clean-shaven, with close-cropped blond hair. Where Cas’s vessel screams burnt-out middle class, this guy screams trust fund. He carries with him that familiar sharp smell of ozone, electric on the air.

Dean files in behind him, with Castiel’s sword in a white-knuckle grip.

Sandalphon looks over the banishing sigil waiting under Sam’s bloodied hand. Sam holds his stare, keeping his fingers a half an inch off the messy paint job, ready to finish it. The angel has the same sharp cogency as Cas, but he’s otherwise unreadable. He hopes they’ve made a sound bet, here.

“Sam Winchester,” Sandalphon greets. His tone is clipped, but calm.

He looks over Castiel, tucked uncomfortably into a pew under a pile of blankets; he steps towards him, but hesitates. His gaze wanders afield, up the length of the pews. “I was under the impression Castiel’s brother might be here.”

“Nanael’s not—“ Sam pauses, awkward. “He’s not here.”

“The demons took him,” Dean says, impatient. “Would’ve taken Cas, too.”

Sandalphon doesn’t say anything. He’s a harder read than Cas; just a subtle tightening of his expression before he’s kneeling beside his brother. Sam tenses, but the hand Sandalphon presses against Castiel’s forehead is gentle. He turns his head carefully, looking over the sigil burned there.

Cas murmurs something. It sounds Enochian. Sandalphon answers in hushed tones.

“Can you break it?”

“Yes.” He rests on his heels, looking towards them. “I think a pocketknife would be suitable.”

Dean pulls his free, offers it. Sandalphon pinches the blade between thumb and forefinger and waits. Red heat blooms in the metal under his fingertips, and spreads. He lets the metal go, turns the knife in his hand and presses the broad side down, burning a small line bisecting the outer perimeter of the sigil.

The charge in the air doubles, static sparking against the sword in Sam’s hand.

Castiel jerks awake and scrambles upright, pressing away from the angel standing over him. His expression falls into confusion. “Sandalphon.”

“It’s good to know you’re alive, Castiel,” he chides.

Castiel looks towards Sam and Dean.

Sandalphon follows the gaze. “I _was_ surprised to hear about your new choice of company.”

“Nanael told you?” Castiel asks, but just as soon sighs. “Of course he told you.”

“24 hours late for reporting in, your last location a massacre, Zachariah threatening disbandment and court martials. Yes, he told me. I want to see that wing. I doubt you set it right. But first--”

Sandalphon pushes aside the blanket to pull at the gauze covering Castiel’s side. He squirms to escape, but stills with a sharp ‘tsk’ from Sandalphon.

The thin red filaments of blood poisoning that had been chasing away from the wound have already started to hastily retreat. But with the seal gone, grace filters blue between the black thread of the stitches. Sandalphon uses the pocket knife to begin plucking the sutures free.

“Hey,” Sam says, affronted.

“You see the grace?” Sandalphon says patiently. “This isn’t an entirely physical wound. Physical methods can’t repair it.”

“Yeah, well -” He huffs, and finishes lamely: “Those took awhile.” He’s still got a crick in his neck to show for it.

“I’ll replace them.”

“Uriel is dead,” Castiel murmurs into the silence. Sandalphon nods. “I killed him,” he adds.

At that, Sandalphon pauses to raise his eyes; something immutable passes between them.

Dean interjects: “Yeah, well, the asshole tried to kill him first.”

Sandalphon smiles thinly as he pulls a bottle free of his back pocket and tips its contents into a clean patch of gauze. It’s a viscous oil, honey-gold and flecked with herbs. “You’ve found some loyal friends, brother. Although I doubt our superiors would approve of teaching hunters banishment sigils.”

That piques Sam’s interest. ‘Hunters’; not ‘humans’.

“Saved his ass with it,” Dean says. Sam winces, but Sandalphon just nods, and gestures towards the sword in Dean’s hand. “Could I borrow that?”

Dean looks to Cas; Cas nods his approval, although he’s looking a little green on the edges.

Sandalphon continues on as he coats the length of the blade in oil: “I was under the impression that hunters discouraged working with the non-human.”

“Yeah, but Cas has a winning personality,” Dean says.

“’Cas’. I was wondering where Dananchiel picked that up. He has half the garrison using it, now.”

Castiel groans.

Sandalphon neatly folds the gauze, places it on the pew, and snaps his fingers alongside the oiled blade. Blue flame chases the length of the sword and holds steady, flickering low.

He bears a steadying hand into Cas’s shoulder.

Dean’s the one to throw his hands up in protest. “Woah, woah, woah, are you gonna--”

Cas digs his fingers into the back of the pew. “This is the cleanest way.”

Cas gives a small nod. Sandalphon bears the sword into the wound.

He takes the branding in stolid silence, but the finger-grooves left in the wood of the pew and the gray seeping into the edges of his face are sign enough that he doesn’t cherish the experience. When it’s finished, Sandalphon smothers the flame in a swath of blanket, and offers the sword back to Sam, hilt-first. He sorts through the first aid kit, reading each label with care, until he comes upon a fresh suture packet. He sets to repairing Sam’s stitches.

Cas speaks in low tones, the rolling vowels and sharp consonants of Enochian; Sandalphon gives a small nod, waits, and Cas rolls slowly on. He holds a steadfast stare with the hymnal in the pew ahead of him.

It’s—personal. A confession.

Sam grabs Dean by the shoulder, dragging him towards the back. Pastor Jim leans against the archway, watching the angels with an expression somewhere between awe and a wry amusement.

“Sorry about the pew, Jim,” Sam says. “We can pay for it.”

“Oh? No, no.”

Dean shrugs. “Hey, you could probably sell it off as a relic. Handprint of a holy tax accountant.”

Jim huffs a polite laugh. “I’m still taking in—“ He gestures towards the angels in the pew. “This.”

“Yeah,” Sam sighs. “So are we.”

“Keep an eye on them? Need some fresh air.” Jim nods along. Dean drags Sam out into the dark.

They settle with slow and careful motions onto the hood of the car, favoring the worst of every bump and bruise with strange contortions. Sam tugs at the gauze on his hand, arranging it neatly over the incision. “Remind me to stitch that up,” Dean says.

“It’s alright.”

There’s a pause as Dean shifts against the windshield, digging something free from his back pocket. A lighter flickers to life in the dark. “There’s always fire--”

“Jesus, no.” Sam slaps the lighter’s lid closed. “Get away from me.”

Humid Midwest air hangs heavy on them for a few minutes. There’s not much light pollution out here, but the air is thick enough and they’re both exhausted enough to leave the stars hazed.

“How was he?” Sam asks. “When you called him.”

“Oh, pissed. We swapped stories about pain-in-the-ass little brothers, and how we’ve gotta save your clumsy asses all the damn time.”

“Screw you.” His tone’s amiable.

Quiet ticks by in the low drone of the peepers down by the river’s edge.

Dean rolls his head back, watches the obscured silhouettes through the stained glass windows. “The hell are they talking about in there.”

“Pain-in-the-ass humans, and how they’ve gotta save our clumsy asses all the damn time.”

Dean gives the lazy snort of the amused half-asleep.

Twenty, thirty minutes of dozing passes before the phone in Sam’s pocket wakes him with a tinny chirp.

Sam pulls the phone out of his pocket clumsily, flicking through the screen. Then he sits abruptly forward. “Dean—“ He turns the cell phone screen his way. Dean squints against the glare.

      **SENDER** : ⏏⏏⏏⏏⏏⏏  
      **MESSAGE** : 42.365109 -83.033781

♤ ♤ ♤

Castiel stares at the screen. “Where do the coordinates go?”

The chapel feels smaller, with Sandalphon gone; even with the sigil broken, Cas feels like less of what he was before.

Sam turns the states map towards him, drops a finger against the right latitude. “Roughly? Detroit, Michigan.”

“It’s an 11 hour drive,” Dean says. “I can probably cut that down to eight, nine, but we’re gonna lose time getting around Chicago.”

“You think Nanael sent this?” Sam asks.

Dean shrugs. “If he did, great, we’ll catch them by surprise. Even if he didn’t, he’s probably still there. They want Cas; the kid is the only leverage they’ve got.”

Castiel cuts them both short with a sharp: “Enough.” He pauses. “I’ve brought you far enough.”

“No. Hell, no,” Dean answers. “Look, I owe that kid something—“

“You owe him nothing. You entered that city on my request--” Dean opens his mouth to argue, but Castiel is speaking above him: “ _Enough._ ”

There’s a long, thin silence between them, crystallizing the desperation in the echo of Castiel’s demand.

Dean’s the one to break the silence in slow, measured words. “You know, you-- You’re the first sign that there’s there might be an end to this. The first proof that there’s something fighting on our side. I mean, you’re short, geeky, questionable fashion, but something.”

Clapping a hand on Castiel’s shoulder, Dean curls the fabric of the trenchcoat into a fist. “You’re one of the good guys, right?” The angel just stares at him, uncertain. Dean pushes away from him and moves out the church doors.

He has to dig through the trunk for awhile before he comes up with the box: a small oak affair, smudged with some half-burnt sage. As he steps back into the light of the church he smears the ash off to clear up the runes engraved in the top, carefully aligned on the edges to form a modified Key of Solomon. Popping the latch, he pulls up the lid and removes the gun within. It’s got the body of an 1836 Texas Paterson, but this particular Colt had been forged a year earlier. Despite being a few months overdue for an oiling, the hammer still pulls smoothly, trigger snapping easily through an empty chamber. There’s a pentagram carved into the handle. Non timebo mala engraved along the long, narrow barrel.

He hands the Colt to Cas, runs a finger over the four remaining bullets set into the foam. They’re numbered in a careful script: _10, 11, 12, 13._ “Our dad used this. Killed the son of a bitch that burned our mom with it. We’ve only got four bullets left, but--”

Castiel turns the gun over in his hands, expression drawn in a pensive frown.

“Killing Yellow Eyes was about all we needed that gun for. Your bro saved my life, so, hey. Worth a bullet or two to save him.”

“We’ll get him back, Cas,” Sam says quietly.

“You, me, an’ Sam,” Dean agrees. He rolls the bullets into his palm and clenches his fist around the cold metal. “God help whoever stands in our way.”

 

 

 

 


	7. The Sky is No Man's Land: Part VII

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Detroit. A favor. Israfiel.

  


_God does not change our course, that is for us to do. All we have done is plan one course, and only one course, and there is only one end._  
—Jeff Shaara, _Gods and Generals_

  


 

 

 

DETROIT, MI  
 _2006-09-06 06:24 AM_

The steeple of Westview Presbyterian still stands, a stunted thing scraping against a damp and gray Detroit sky. Nonetheless, the empty maws where some of the stained glass windows had been suggest the flock has moved on. Another has gathered on the church’s cracked steps, humans that cast the poisonous shadows of demonic possession.

More appear on the church’s edges, drawn by the flavor of an angel’s flagging grace on the wind. Castiel waits alone in the empty expanse of cracked asphalt, hands loose by his sides.

♤ ♤ ♤

Sam watches Castiel from a dumpster’s edge in the narrow drive separating the church from its derelict neighbors. He looks smaller than ever, from here. But by the electric charge that’s been growing on the air since they arrived, he’s anything but.

Dean raps his knuckles against his sleeve. “C’mon, boost me up.”

“Yeah,” Sam mutters. He interweaves his fingers into a foothold and gives Dean a lift onto the scaffolding lining one side of the church. The scaffolds were probably erected back when they thought Westview had some hope of preservation in a dying city. Since then, the boards have rotted, and Dean takes in the creak and sway of the structure with a hissed, “Screw _this._ ”

Sam keeps one eye on the street, one eye on Dean, crawling carefully up the rusted metal support struts. “Y’see an opening?”

Dean shuffles around for ten, twenty seconds more before he sticks his head back over the rotting boards and whispers back: “Yeah—there’s a busted window up here. Full of pigeon shit, but…” He shrugs, and disappears. With the faint pop of glass crushing under hand and foot, he crawls his way in.

In the silence, Sam takes an uneasy glance up the alleyway. The air feels thin, here, thin like it had been in Chicago, but in Chicago things had felt _alive_ , the skin of the city shifting restlessly beneath their feet. Detroit is stagnant, soft. Rotting.

Somewhere up above, the clouds give a little, and the first drops of rain begin to fall.

Dean gives two knocks on the boards above; all clear.

He looks back at Cas – standing there with his head tilted towards the obscured light of the rising sun – and grabs hold of the boards to heft himself up.

♤ ♤ ♤

The demons watch Castiel with a black-eyed hunger. He is small, and weak, and those that smell that weakness on him bare their teeth in pleasure, ignorant of the pressure building overhead.

He waits with empty hands. The first to approach does so in casual confidence, eyes flooding black as he steps within Castiel’s influence. He doesn’t flinch. He smiles widely, instead. “Castiel, right?” He assesses the empty street with theatric flair. “Just you? Glad to hear it. The boss wants a meeting. We’ll escort you in.”

“I don’t require an escort,” he answers.

The demon feigns insult. “Well, that’s not my call, little man.”

In a simple motion, Castiel seizes the demon by the jaw. He ignores the fingers scrabbling blindly at his sleeve as he sears its essence into nothing. The host collapses at his feet.

The remaining demons hesitate, watching with the cautious calculation of a scavenger. When they move again, they move as one. With the low thrum of distant thunder, the rain begins to fall in earnest.

♤ ♤ ♤

It’s a bitch, fitting behind pews this short. Sam edges along the rows in an awkward shuffle, knee scraping on the bench while his shoulder jams into every jutting divider. Dean’s lucky he’s the better marksman.

He’s measuring his footsteps carefully, spreading his weight evenly on the aging floors. It’s only the rain, drumming a steady rhythm on the roof and spattering loud on the floors where it’s found a way to stream in, that covers the groans and creaks beneath his feet.

He pauses with his shoulders under the unsteady mop of Nanael’s hair. The angel’s sitting stock upright, gaze fixed on the demons lounging around the pulpit. Sam had counted three from the upper balcony; Marchosias, the other demon from the warehouse, and another one, a male, the face only vaguely familiar. Something off a magazine cover.

“Hey, Nan,” Sam whispers low, under the drum of the rain. His fingers work slowly at the cap of a salt canister. “You with me?”

Nanael’s head dips in a nod, a prayer, or both.

When Sam rises past the pew’s height, he moves fast.

He bunches Nanael’s shirt in two fistfuls and jerks him into the aisle, taking a rapid but careful turn to spill salt in an unbroken circle around them. Nanael’s hands are bound in chains, but the sigil’s still visible, raised in red on the flesh of his inner wrist. Sam digs for the knife and lighter in his pocket.

Marchosias’s lieutenant is only one step off the platform when the loud report of Dean’s Glock is plucking neat holes in the fabric of his suit. He stills, and turns his attention to the upper balcony.

Marchosias waves a hand, drops an elbow to the pulpit. The other suit starts stalking up the aisle. Sam pays him no mind, focused on running his lighter’s flame over the blade just long enough to get the temperature he needs.

Somewhere up on the upper tier, there’s a single gunshot – low and muffled, the Colt, not the Glock – but Sam can’t look, not right now. Nanael is saying, “Sam, _Sam_ —“ but Sam just tunes him out. Then Nanael’s saying, “Calabriel—“

Sam places the unknown suit’s face, then, and looks up right before Calabriel - _angel_ Calabriel - steps over the salt line and punches him in the chest. The air spills out of him in an explosive burst, and he’s pretty goddamn sure he hears something crack. The knife clatters against the floor by Nanael’s feet. The angel digs his fingers into the collar of Sam’s shirt and then Sam’s off the ground and hitting a front pew, hard.

♤ ♤ ♤

Dean gets two solid shots off into Glasses before he gets down the steps. It’s just the Glock, but that cold iron’s gotta burn like a bitch. Glasses looks towards Marchosias; Marchosias gives a small jerk of his chin. With a dramatic explosion of black sulfur the demon’s rolling right at him.

Dean lets the putrid smoke wash over him as he rolls onto his back, pulling the Colt out of his belt as he does. The demon reforms two rows above him and sneers beneath his glasses at the relic in Dean’s hands. This is the the suited bastard that had taken Cas’s brother, and he’s clean in the Colt’s sights. Dean doesn’t hesitate to pull the trigger. This one hits heart, and the demon lights up like the Fourth of July. Dean watches him go with a savage pleasure.

He hopes Yellow Eyes had the same damn look on his face when his dad had done the same.

There’s a heavy sound of flesh-on-flesh below, and Nanael’s shouting; Dean rolls back to his stomach, sighting Marchosias down the Colt’s barrel. He gets one shot off - a miss that just plucks a neat hole in the pulpit, _shit_ \- before the bastard is reeling Sam casually in from the splintered mess of a pew, tugging the pocketknife from Sam’s hand to press it against his throat. He puts Sam’s taller frame to full use, dragging him up to block every viable shot Dean’s got.

The grigori adjusts the blade to rest its point on Sam’s carotid artery. “I have many places to choose from. You have none. Throw down the gun.” His voice carries easily through the church’s vaulted ceilings.

“Fuck.” Dean puts another inch, half-inch of pressure on the trigger before he relents and slams the Colt against the wood. “ _Fuck._ ”

♤ ♤ ♤

There’s a long moment where Sam’s really hoping Dean’s working up some kind of trickshot to murder this bastard. Then Dean’s standing up, and the Colt’s taking a slow, lazy arc through the humid air to clatter against a pew.

Marchosias buries a fist in Sam’s gut and returns him forcefully to the ground as soon as the Colt hits the floor. By the time Sam can gather enough breath to get himself up he’s staring down the barrel of the Colt.

Dean stares from the upper tier, expression one of flat rage.

“Do not,” Marchosias says simply, but he’s not talking to either of them. He’s watching Calabriel, who stands with a sword in hand.

Calabriel doesn’t look to him, only to Nanael. “He has seen me.”

Nanael gives a wavering smirk. “I didn’t have to see you.”

The angel curls a fist into Nanael’s collar, jerking him close.

“He will not leave here,” Marchosias says.

“Hm. And how many times has the other little one escaped you? Castiel? And already faring better in this skirmish than you.” He passes a disinterested eye over Sam, and Dean.

Marchosias doesn’t rise to the challenge. “There are orders.”

“Orders?” Calabriel shoves Nanael back and turns his glance back to Marchosias, lips upturned in a mocking smile. “You presume to give _me_ —“

He’s cut short when the church bleaches static-white with lightning, close enough to set the air humming. The peal of thunder that follows is a concussive blast, shaking plaster and broken glass down from the rafters above, reverberating down to the very foundations.

Calabriel is staring, pale, at the chapel doors. Upstairs, Dean starts to run.

♤ ♤ ♤

The rain falls in earnest now, a deluge. Castiel’s hands slip on what flesh he manages to find purchase on, but so too do the demons’. There isn’t the time to burn out those he grasps before he is torn away; he’s forced to draw Dean’s blade. It is crafted perfectly for these lower demons, borne of mankind and mankind’s sins. He rends flesh and bone, disables or destroys.

Blood soaks heavy on the sleeves of his coat before the static charge on the air reaches its height. He only takes note of it when the demons shrink back, repelled by an instinctual fear.

With a blinding bright lightning sinks its teeth into the pavement at Castiel’s heels, shearing the demons’ ranks in two. Thunder shatters the air, shaking apart the pavement beneath their feet. In the reverberations of the aftermath Sandalphon rises from the crater, a greater and brighter thing than the demons were expecting to face.

Around him, his brothers and sisters descend to the cracked tarmac. It’s not a full complement, only those Sandalphon could summon, but their presence hangs heavy and electric on the air. His garrisonmates brush against his shoulders as they pass – Adnachiel, Dananchiel.

“All this--?” Castiel shouts above the din of rain and rising thunder. The storm has the flavor of an arch’s power.

“I called in a favor,” Sandalphon says with a thin smile, and buries his sword in a demon’s throat to force his way past. With their brothers at their flanks, they drive forward, towards the doors of the church; the demons part in panic before the edges of their swords.

♤ ♤ ♤

With the lightning strike, comes chaos.

Eyes tight with fear, Calabriel seizes a handful of Nanael’s hair and moves to draw the sword across his throat. Nanael grabs at the blade with his bound hands; blood spills dark between his clenched fingers, but the chains arrest the blade’s momentum.

Sam dives for Uriel’s sword, lost in his unexpected trip down the aisle. It’s an awkward weight, longer than anything he’s thrown before, but it’s a risk he has to take. He gives it one testing bounce in his hand and throws. It buries hilt-deep in Calabriel’s shoulder, too high to hit anything vital, but deep enough to draw a burst of grace that leaves the angel barking a sibilant shout of pain.

To his credit, Calabriel doesn’t falter. He lets Nanael’s head go and shoves at the blade with two hands, ignorant of the blood spilling down the back of his well-tailored suit.

Sam twists to meet Marchosias, bearing into him with his shoulder as he drops an elbow hard on his forearm in hopes of knocking the Colt loose. The Grigori buries a knee in deep enough in Sam’s stomach to touch spine and lets him fall, winded, to the floor.

Nanael is straining against Marchosias, leveraging the angel’s weakened left arm to scrabble a blind hand at his back, trying to work Uriel’s sword free.

At the back of the church, the chapel doors open onto the incoherent chaos of the demon battle raging outside.

Calabriel stills. A single voice calls him out, its intonation damning: “ _Calabriel—_ ”

Before he can even take sight of who’s entered, Calabriel is fleeing. He leaves his sword behind. It falls from Nanael’s bloodied hands, clattering against the floor.

“Pig,” Marchosias mutters, and heaves Sam bodily to his feet.

It’s Castiel alone that emerges from the shadows at the back of the church, the folds of his trenchcoat weighed down with rainwater and the darker stains of blood. His sword flashes bright in his grip as he takes in Nanael – gingerly rescuing Calabriel’s sword from the floor – and Marchosias, who bears the Colt into Sam’s temple. Dean is sprinting up the pews, and grabs at Nanael to pull him back towards the salt circle.

“I never did catch your companions’ names, Castiel,” Marchosias says.

Dean answers: “Fuck you.” He’s dragging the lighter out of his backpocket.

“By your possession here—“ he taps the Colt against Sam’s skull – “I would guess they are the sons of the late John Winchester. Kind of you to return this to us.”

He waits, watches as Castiel closes the distance between them in the slow, measured steps of holy wrath. When the distance is closed enough Marchosias throws Sam aside, and slams a fist into Castiel’s jaw. Before the angel can retaliate Marchosias is seizing him by the lapels and giving him a bodily hurl. He hits the pulpit with the crack of splintering wood, and lands hard on the stairs.

Marchosias snaps his fingers. Fire blooms at the pulpit’s base before chasing outward in an unnaturally straight line: following the holy oil spilt carefully across the steps of the stage. Castiel stops where he’s rising, turns, even spreads his wings – broken or no – to escape by flight but the flames outrun him, racing greedily down the steps to complete the circle. Castiel pulls up short of the circle’s edge. The edges of his pinion feathers singe on the rising smoke, and he hastily withdraws them. The burning oil’s effects settle in, thick and suffocating.

Sam is rising to his feet. “Cas?” The angel takes a step back from the flame and shakes his head, slowly, hands falling loose by his sides.

He pulls at his jacket, thinking to smother the flame, but Marchosias raises the Colt to settle on his forehead. Again, simply, “Do not.”

Dean grabs at Nanael’s wrist, rolling back his sleeve to bare the sigil there.

“Sam—“ Nanael gives Calabriel’s sword an awkward toss. It hits the floor a few feet short of him.

There’s a two, three second pause as human and grigori gauge each other. At their backs, Dean presses the hot knife against Nanael’s skin.

Sam lunges for the sword. Marchosias slams him down and kicks it away. Sam is rising to hit Marchosias with a full-bodied tackle when Nanael is right there, the broken links of chain that had been binding him clattering on the floor, and he brings his fists down on the back of Marchosias’s head. The demon goes down hard.

Nanael pulls Sam up, but Sam’s searching for the sword – it’s over by the pulpit stairs, lit bright by the holy flames. Dean buries his heel on Marchosias’s wrist, grabbing for the Colt, but Marchosias is gathering his feet, and his iron grip with it; at their backs Castiel presses at the limits of the flames, shouting, “Nanael, take the Winchesters. _Go--_ ”

But Nanael isn’t moving.

He watches, shoulders slack, as a woman enters beneath the faded mural of what had once been a cross, bare feet silent amongst the rotted wood and shattered glass of the chapel floor.

There’s a crash as Marchosias throws Dean into a pew. He shoves the Colt into his belt and drags Dean from the wreckage by the wrist, seizes Sam by the collar of his jacket, an errant parent gathering his unruly children.

She drops down the steps of the stage, balances her hands on slim hips and looks between them: the four in the aisle, and Castiel encircled in flame. “Brothers. Oh, sit, please, sit.”

Only the Winchesters do so, forced into kneeling by Marchosias’s crushing grip on their shoulders.

To Castiel, the vessel is a familiar one.

“Israfiel,” Castiel breathes in disbelief. But there’s something strange to her; her grace too bright, hard to pull to focus across the smoke of the flames.

She smiles as she bends gracefully to retrieve the discarded sword from the floor. Beneath her touch, fingers of frost curl up the length of the blade. “It’s good to see you, brother. And Nanael--” She stops, and gives Marchosias a stern look as she steps forward. She takes Nanael’s hands – still bloodied – within her own. The blood clears beneath her touch, leaving unbroken flesh beneath. Nanael’s uncertain step back is arrested by Israfiel’s hand on his shoulder.

Castiel desperately wills Nanael to go, _fly_ , but his wide-eyed attention is wholly on Israfiel – who is now turning to him.

“I apologize for this.” She motions towards the flames and Marchosias both, who stands silent over the Winchesters. “I wanted a—“ She considers. “Calm discussion.”

“Who are you?” Castiel asks slowly.

She smiles. “Your sister, Castiel.” She bears her thumb into Nanael’s collarbone; he shakes beneath her touch. “I’m not certain what Uriel told you about what we have to offer, but—“

“We already gave our answer,” Castiel interjects.

She stops, raising her gaze to Castiel. Assessing. “What we offer, Castiel, is freedom. You would be a great asset to us. The both of you.”

Nanael answers first, steadfast under the weight of her touch: “No.”

“We serve the Will,” Castiel answers in turn. He nods towards the Winchesters across the flames. “And we serve them.”

He will remember her next motions. The simplicity of them.

Her expression draws into a grave affect as she dips her head in a single nod of acceptance. She smoothes her fingers down the wrinkled shoulder of Nanael’s shirt.

In as simple and fluid a motion, she runs the sword through his throat.

She smiles in the stunned silence, a regretful gesture. “Israfiel gave much the same answer.”

Blood – bright, pulsing - spills in a flood down the front of Nanael’s shirt, between his grasping fingers, as he collapses to his knees.

Castiel lunges against the limits of his prison, ignorant of the edges of his grace searing against the flames. He is screaming his disbelief, his denial, and if he can cross – if he can stem the flood, stop it –

No one listens. Nothing stops. Grace blooms bright between Nanael’s bloodied fingers and the hum of his frequency rises, and crests, and shivers apart into a blinding silence that settles in as a choking weight, too heavy to bear.

Marchosias has turned his face away. The Winchesters stare, pale and silent mortal witnesses to the passage of an immortal thing.

Castiel raises his eyes back to the figure standing tall across the flames. Israfiel’s last vessel stares back at him, but the grace beneath is something large and looming, and slicked with the blood and ash of Hell.

“Lucifer.”

She kneels in the dust to press a hand to Nanael’s face, gently pulling his eyelids closed. She places the sword – lined in frost and blood – by his slack fingers. “It’s good of you to remember me, brother.”

“You’re wearing her.” Shock dulls the observation to a comfortable distance.

“Her vessel,” she corrects. “This is a war, Castiel. We must make use of what we can.” She rises back to her feet, splays her skirt in a small curtsy. “For those we cannot convert, the vessels are more easily persuaded. I wear them as long as I can, but—“ She pauses to press a hand to her throat, where the skin has peeled and blistered. “It’s difficult, fitting into such a tiny thing. Humans wear thin.”

The words wash over him, empty and meaningless. His attention is upon the soot wings scrawled across the floor, the loose curl of the fingers of Nanael’s vessel.

Eternity, severed.

Lucifer brushes a hand across the air. The fire is smothered before Castiel’s feet, the suffocating weight of its hold extinguished. He takes a shuddering breath, and Lucifer is there before him, wearing his sister’s last shape. She touches a soft hand to his face, follows his stare to his dead brother.

“Castiel. It’s better this way - to put them down quickly,” she says. “But you. You’ve shown initiative, little one. I do applaud that.”

Israfiel had been ripped from this vessel, screaming. Wrath curdles, low and burning, at the very core of him.

“I don’t often ask this twice,” Lucifer intones.

Castiel blinks, raising his gaze towards Lucifer. She waits, patient and gentle and bright, but beneath he can see the same poisoned madness that stains all the Fallen.

He drives his sword towards her heart.

Lucifer arrests the movement with a bruising grip on his arm. She wrenches his wrist aside in a smooth, forceful motion, severing tendon and shattering bone. The blade she catches in her free hand. She casts it carelessly aside before forcing Castiel to the ground. She bears a hand against his chest, leans close. His grace recoils beneath her touch.

“That is your answer, then,” she breathes. “So be it.”

She steps towards the Winchesters, gestures; as Castiel moves to rise Marchosias is there to force him back to his knees. Lucifer draws the Colt from Marchosias’s belt. What move the Winchesters could make is arrested as the barrel moves towards them. First one brother, then the other. “Marchosias tells me these two were present at Uriel’s death; withstood the light. I see it’s true. What a rare thing. Not one vessel, but two. And empty, so late in the war.”

She plucks distastefully at the dust and sweat of Dean’s collar, skates her fingers across Sam’s mussed hair – and pauses. Touches a knee briefly to the scuffed floor to study Sam’s face in full.

He stares back, the flush of adrenaline draining slowly from his face.

A small smile tugs at her lips. She rises back to her feet.

“The Father you chose is watching this, Castiel,” Lucifer states. Still, with that cloying sympathy. She raises the gun and says: “He is watching all of this, and He does nothing. That is who you serve.”

There’s a moment of stillness as Lucifer sights Dean’s skull down the Colt’s narrow barrel.

The Colt clicks through an empty chamber.

Dean grins, and grabs at the Colt as Sam lunges up, catching Marchosias beneath the ribs in a low tackle and shoving him free of Castiel.

With very little thought at all, Castiel punches Lucifer in the face. The cartilage and bone of her nose shatters beneath his knuckles. The Colt comes free into Dean’s hands.

Sam hits the floorboard and rolls as Lucifer lunges after Castiel, seizing at his jaw, his shoulders, pulling him into an inescapable embrace. The rafters above groan as her fury pulses on the air, plaster sifting free in long trailing streams.

Dean moves fast and sure: he spills the last two bullets from his jacket pocket into his hand, pulling the Colt’s hammer to half-cock and snapping the cylinder loose. Sam’s hitting the floorboards hard while Dean thumbs the bullets into place with steady hands; but Castiel’s sword is still on the ground, and Sam scrambles for it. Dean has to duck a blow from Marchosias before Sam carves a jagged line down his right thigh, sending blood-red sparks chasing under the fabric of his slacks.

As the demon pushes up and staggers back, fist raised, Dean takes the shot. The bullet hits just to the left of heart. Every one of his ribs is thrown into a hellish silhouette, but it’s not right, not bright enough. The demon staggers, looks on them both with rage, and fear, and then he’s gone, dusting off in a flow of black ichor.

Lucifer pays his exit no mind.

“I am your sister, Castiel,” Lucifer snarls through Israfiel’s tongue, and bears her fingers as claws down into the space between his ribs, into his grace, searing him with her own essence. The corruption of her sinks to his core, and in that moment – a singular moment of infernal cold - he knows the agony of an existence far from God. “I am your _arch._ You may have turned your face from the Fall but we, we have not forgotten, and we will remind you of it in flesh and blood and _fire_ when we take the Fields of Heaven as our own.”

A single gunshot. Lucifer’s head jerks aside, and she staggers and falls into the dusty pews.

Dean stares steadily down the barrel of the Colt.

Sam is solid hands grabbing a hold of Castiel’s shoulder before he falls. “Did that—“ Sam begins, as Castiel pulls his own weight beneath him. He follows Sam’s stare towards the woman sprawled on the rotting floorboards and answers, “No.”

He stumbles to Nanael, passes a hand briefly over the vessel’s face, and grabs instead for the sword by his side. Calabriel’s.

Dean still has the empty barrel of the Colt trained on Lucifer’s vessel as it rises from the ground, bloodied fingernails bearing hard into the dark oak of the pew. With two rapid backsteps – clumsy, panicked - Castiel seizes Dean by the shoulder, Sam by the back of his neck, and throws his wings open.

They sustain a single beat of flight before the fracture, barely knitted, gives beneath the weight. It’s just enough for Castiel to deliver them to the mayhem of the street outside. Dean and Sam come to a jarring landing on hands and knees; Castiel falls into a loose tumble, the fresh insult to his wing and the dulled shock of Lucifer, Israfiel, _Nanael_ leaving him sprawled, insensate, across the cracked asphalt.

He drags a hand out, to find it crushed beneath the heel of a boot. A demon reaches for his wings – still extended – but reels back to avoid the broad swing of a sword.

“Yeah, back the hell off—“ Dean’s shouting, and Sam is pulling insistently at Castiel’s shoulder. The demon above is lurching forward, hands extended as claws towards the easy prize of a cripple, but a hand is bearing into the flesh of its skull, burning its essence through with a swift rush of a familiar Heavenly frequency.

Adnachiel releases the dead host and looks down, expression turning in surprise, and grief. They’ve felt Nanael’s passing. “Castiel?” He looks up to the church steps, shouting: “Sandalphon! He’s out.”

Sandalphon is a fury, parting the throng of demons in broad strokes to force his way towards the church doors. At Adnachiel’s call he turns on his heel. Three angels rise up to hold his place on the line as he withdraws. Hale wings are enough to cross the space in an instant, but Castiel is recoiling from Sandalphon’s hold. Their grief is a heavy thing. “We have to retreat,” he says. “Lucifer—“

“Yes. Adnachiel—“

“I have it.”

He signals the withdrawal; as one, they pull back, and scatter.

Castiel watches as Lucifer steps across the threshold to stand in the lee of the doorway, bare feet pristine amongst the soot and blood of the battle. She smiles, and tilts her head to watch them go.

♤ ♤ ♤

BLUE EARTH, MN  
 _2006-09-06 08:32 PM_

Castiel left almost as soon as their feet hit Minnesota pine needles, a rambling excuse about court martials and a ‘Be healed’ tap from Sandalphon and poof, done, we now return you to your regular programming.

A showdown with the Devil herself and they have nothing to show for it – a touch of two fingers from Sandalphon and every bruise and fracture is gone, just leaving the heavy weight of weariness behind.

Sam and Dean had dragged themselves up Jim’s creaking stairs and crawled into beds that their feet hadn’t dangled off of quite as much when they were kids. They’re too tired to care.

Dean wakes to dusk, and Sam burying a fist in the fabric of his pillow. As he rubs the last clinging haze of sleep out of his eyes he reaches out a hand to shake Sam awake, but just as he draws close Sam eases, drifting back into something calmer.

(Sam dreams of Lucifer, testing the syllables of his name with a warm smile: _Sam-u-el_.)

Dean takes a slow walk through the quiet hallways of the house before he toes on his boots and takes a step outside.

He settles on the porch steps and slowly pulls the empty Colt from his belt, turning it over in his hands. He opens the chamber and clicks through the black shadows of each empty chamber, and thinks – inexplicably – of Dad, dead in some roadside ditch, car accident of all the stupid shit, and Marchosias sparking from the inside out with the nasty jagged edges of whatever a million years of Hell does to a would-be angel, and of Nanael, spilling light in whorls of incomprehensible grace across a dusty chapel floor. Click. Click. Click.

Everyone plays the game; everyone gets everything and nothing.

He gives the cylinder a last spin and slaps it closed.

There’s still sulfur on his clothes, and a knife tucked into his belt that kills demons, and a sheaf full of notes in Sam’s backpack from a dozen angel interviews between here and Van Nuys, California, and Dean doesn’t know where that all tallies up on God’s see-saw of _giveth and taketh away_. He’s got an empty gun in his hand, but more direction – just a little more – than when he’d followed a crowd of demons into a park in North Platte, Nebraska.

He’s got a call to an irate Bobby Singer to put in, and then he thinks he might have to head into town to pick up a bottle of whiskey. Sam’ll be up soon, and he’s interested in seeing if he can revive the age-old tradition of walking the railroad tracks that run down by the river. The night is warm and the tracks are long and Pastor Jim’s house is too damn small. Now, the whiskey is going to be Evan Williams, because it’s cheap and Dean’s buying and Sam’s just going to have to shut up and drink it.

He’s got one foot on the porch when the wind scuffs up, just a little, stirring the sluggish air.

“I could ask the weapons master about that.”

Dean turns on his heel, takes in the trenchcoated tax accountant standing on Jim’s gravel drive. He gives Sandalphon – standing stoically by the bumper of Pastor Jim’s pick-up – a wave.

Castiel gestures towards the Colt. “The gun. Perhaps more bullets could be manufactured.”

“You think?”

Castiel shrugs. It’s a new trick of his, but he’s getting pretty good at it. Dean breaks a weary smile and drops a hand on his shoulder. Cas gives him a good static zap at the connection; he winces back, shaking out a numb hand. “Hey, you’re not court-martialled.”

Castiel nods. “I am not.”

“What about the other guy?”

Cas tenses up. “Calabriel was found guilty. The sword was damning evidence in itself, but--” He pauses, relaxes briefly as he gives Dean a testing stare. “Zachariah had amassed a large amount of evidence against him, it seems.”

Dean gives an innocent shrug. “Sam might’ve mentioned something about something, but hey, don’t look at me. I can’t even keep your damn names straight. Sandals, right?” He gives their stoic eavesdropper a wave. The angel’s impressive poker face cracks, just a little, for a sideways glance somewhere between confusion and mild displeasure.

Cas’s jaw jumps up in the subtle gesture Dean’s taken for embarrassment, which just cements the nickname pretty much permanently. Sandals it is.

Cas pulls on one of those doe-eyed expressions, and starts in on some pre-planned speech. “I came to thank—“

Dean stops him there. “Hey, look, whatever.” He pauses briefly to relish the confused look on Cas’s face, then rolls on: “Look. I know you’ve got a war. But you guys exist on a millennia-scale, and we’re on more of a week-to-week thing, so what do you say you put that off a few days and come with us? There’s this chili dog down in Ohio that you’ve just gotta try. It’s messy as hell, you’ll hate it.” And yeah, maybe that was a little pre-planned, too, but—whatever.

There’s a long, awkward pause, in which an umpteen-million-year-old being takes a slow look towards his older brother.

Sandalphon stares the both of them down, stern. “That wing requires rest, and recuperation. You’re not to involve him in anything that will interfere with that.”

“Yeah, sure.” Dean holds up a hand, thumb folded over pinky. “Scout’s honor.”

“I’ll take that as an oath,” Sandalphon answers solemnly.

Castiel nods. “I’ll be back in two days’ time.”

Sandalphon places a hand on Cas’s shoulder. “You’ll be back when you wish to be.” He pauses, and rolls an eye Heavenward. “Or as long as I can convince the Council to give, Father help me.” He gives the Winchesters a last look; this one measured, and almost curious. Dean gets the feeling that he’s looking for whatever Castiel sees, there. His eyebrows twitch together in a way that makes Dean think he doesn’t quite get it, but he concludes, “I’m at your call,” and with a restless shift of air, he’s gone.

Hell, Dean doesn’t quite get it, either.

But he does jab a finger at Castiel’s face and say, “I’m gonna find a food you like.” He grabs Cas by the collar of his ridiculous trenchcoat and drags him down the porch, digging the Impala’s keys out of his pocket as he goes. “How do you feel about whiskey?”

“Uhm—“

“Don’t worry, you’ll love it. C’mon.” He plants a hand between the angel’s shoulderblades and shoves him towards shotgun. There’s a hum in his bones and a fair amount of static on the radio, but hell. That’s what the tapes are there for anyway.

“Did I play Zeppelin yet?” Dean asks as he drops behind the wheel.

“47 times,” Castiel answers as he dutifully retrieves the shoebox from beneath the seat. The tapes have been neatly arranged and rewound since an Angel of the Lord took over for Sam’s shameful mix tape neglect.

Dean ignores him. “You seem like a Zeppelin guy. Let’s do Zeppelin.” He fishes the tape out blind, throws it in the deck.

The angel in shotgun, well, he doesn’t complain, ‘cause he knows what’s good for him.

 

 

 

Finis

 

 

 

 

  
_If the war goes on – and it will, it will – what else can we do but go on?_  
 _It is the same question forever, what else can we do?_  
 _If they fight, we will fight with them._  
 _And what does it matter after all who wins?_

_Was that ever really the question?_

__

 

_Will God ask that question in the end?  
_  
—Michael Shaara, _The Killer Angels_  


 

 

 

 

 

 

 


End file.
